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GUIDE BOOK TO 
WOMEN 



4. 


OLiju^ CuzLT } ■ 




GUIDE BOOK TO 
WOMEN 


BY 

JAMES JAMES 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
681 Fifth Avenue 







Copyright, 1921 

By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

All Rights Reserved 


NOV 26 1921 


§>CI.A627880 



Printed in the United States p/ Ar^ericq, 





CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Preface No. I. For Men Only vii 

Preface No. II. For Women Only xiii 


CHAP. 


I. —Woman: Her Beauty . 



1 

II. —Woman: Her Dress 



. 17 

III. —Woman: Her Work 



. 44 

IV. —Woman: Her Types 



. 67 

V. —Woman: Her Brain 



. 88 

VI. —Woman: Her Soul 



. 109 

VII. —Woman: Her Life 



. 110 

VIII. —Woman: Her Religion 



. 138 

IX. —Woman: Her Job . 



. 143 

X. —Woman: Herself . 



. 149 


v 

































« 








PREFACE NO. I 


“for men only” 


(Men readers, if any , are requested to turn 
to page xiii, where they will find another preface 
marked “For Women Only/') 


URIOUS, isn’t it? that though there are 



guide books to everything else on earth there 
are no guide books to the most interesting thing in 
the world, Woman. There is not even a correct time¬ 
table of the dear thing. 

Though Solomon explored this unknown country 
of Womankind many centuries ago, his discoveries 
are of little use to the modern man about to marry 
one of the inhabitants. And Solomon was almost a 
resident in that delectable realm of womankind, 
whereas the modem man is merely a tourist. Of a 
general knowledge of the manners and customs of 
these unknown folk the modern man is lacking. 
During his life a man seldom knows intimately more 
than six of the inhabitants of the realm of woman; 
and invariably he wishes he hadn’t; and the particu¬ 
lar one he knows most about he ultimately discovers 
that he doesn’t know at all. 


Vll 


Vlll 


Preface No. I 


It is as if he traversed that vast territory, in which 
dwells half the population of the globe, provided 
with a Baedeker which notes only a dozen points of 
interest; and even for these he has only time for a 
hasty glance. He has so many other things to do. 

While this guide book does not pretend to a uni¬ 
versal knowledge of this practically unexplored coun¬ 
try—for it is the first of its kind—it aims to put the 
earnest student of this fascinating subject on the 
track of discoveries, and to indicate to the mere tour¬ 
ist what he should look for and how best to employ 
his limited time. 

Indeed, it is the confident hope of the compiler of 
this guide book that both the earnest student and 
the adventurous tourist may he led to make more 
interesting discoveries in the course of their investi¬ 
gations ; and these the compiler hopes to incorporate 
in the succeeding editions of this standard work. 

WHAT A MAN DOESN'T KNOW 

Ho one would be so foolish as to assert that there 
is no need for such a guide book. Indeed, the com¬ 
piler is convinced that there is extant to-day no other 
work that in its special way is of more importance 
to the male half of humanity. For it is generally 
admitted that man’s ignorance of woman is appalling 
*—which, of course, is a bit of luck for women. 


IX 


For Men Only 

What a man doesn’t know about women would fill 
volumes—at least it will fill this volume. 

The great worlds of literature, the drama, and the 
moving pictures exist simply as a frank confession 
that we don’t know a single thing about the person 
who sleeps in the same double-bed, or at least in the 
same bedroom, with us for the greater part of our 
lives. And the young man who hopes that an inhab¬ 
itant of this little-known world will ultimately share 
a double-bed with him has not the remotest knowl¬ 
edge of the topography or geography of the individ¬ 
ual he has—or thinks he has—selected. 

Why does literature flourish ? Why do theatrical 
managers become millionaires? Why does every¬ 
body go to the movies ? Merely that we men may by 
careful study of the ways and habits of these strange 
female creatures, as depicted on the printed page, 
shown under the spot light, and flickering on the 
screen, discover why—for instance. . . 

A mere male, by a catastrophe that might happen 
—but happily doesn’t often happen—to any of us, 
was once shown into the wrong division of a bathing 
shed. The attendant by mistake opened for him the 
door marked, “For Women Only.” 

His first startled glance showed six girls dressed in 
the costume they were horn in. They were luxuriat¬ 
ing in the sunlight in their rare freedom from cor¬ 
sets and other things—such as tight shoes- 


X 


Preface No. I 


Exactly one-fifth of a second before he saw them 
they saw him. What could they do ? Five of the 
girls instinctively adopted the modest pose favored 
by nudes when being painted by old masters. 

Natural, you say ? Yes, but the sixth girl ? 

Instinctively she rejected that crude sentiment of 
modesty. The part of herself that she covered with 
her hands was her face. 

Why ? Because her instinct was surer, more 
characteristically feminine. She knew that one 
girl undressed is quite like another. You recognize 
them by their faces, not their figures. This wise 
virgin didn’t mind the male intruder seeing her 
body as long as he didn’t recognize her. And he 
could identify her only by her face. He had 
glimpsed a vision of her in the altogether, but how 
would he know her again ? 

Well . . . it is such a problem as this that all the 
novelists, all the dramatists, all the poets, all the 
scenario-manufacturers in the world are struggling 
to solve. For without the cunningly concealed mys¬ 
tery of woman there would be no authors’ royalties 
in the world—and no marrying or giving in 
marriage. 

GIRLS YOU MIGHTN'T HAVE MARRIED 

As for the need of a comprehensive guide book to 
women, the male reader, a small proportion of whom 


XI 


For Men Only 

it is the earnest hope of the compiler will be tempted 
to study this book, will on looking back on his life 
confess that he has not got all out of his existence 
that he had wished for. There is for the man always 
a regret, or seventy regrets, at the back of his mind. 
Looking back on his youth, or maybe his middle 
age, he cannot help thinking of the chances he had 
missed. There were girls—heaps of them—he might 
have kissed, girls he might have flirted with, girls 
he mightn’t have married—if he had only known. 
There were seductive snares and innocent-looking 
traps and delicious temptations through which he 
had carelessly and innocuously stepped; and it was 
only years afterwards that he had suddenly seen 
what delectable dangers he had escaped—and 
regretted it ever after. 

There was that airman with that wonderful record 
in the war who unaccountably crashed while doing 
a nose-dive for fun. For on the way down he had 
suddenly awakened up to the fact of what that 
widow meant three years before when she . . . but it 
is no use recalling these tragedies. It is the earnest 
belief of the compiler of this guide book that such 
fatalities will diminish in the immediate future. 

For all of us, if we look back, there were adven¬ 
tures waiting for us just around a thousand forbid¬ 
den corners—and we never turned one of those 
delightful corners! We read the sign, “Keep off the 


Preface No. I 


xii 

grass!” and if we had only looked closer we would 
have seen that it really read, “Come in!” And we 
didn’t. The road to Hades is paved with bad inten¬ 
tions—missed. The saddest thought in all the world 
is the girls you might have kissed and didn’t. Look¬ 
ing back on it all we see that our path through life 
was full of colour and allurement and excitement, 
and we didn’t wade right in. 

And why? Simply because we didn’t know— 
until too late. Simply because we had never come 
across a guide book to women. 


PREFACE No. II 


“for women only” 

( Women readers, if any, are referred to page 
vii for the preface they will prefer to read ) 

I T is really for women only that this guide book is 
written. For though a man can get along with 
his wife quite comfortably without ever understand¬ 
ing her, or attempting to understand her, woman 
passes her whole life vaguely wondering who or what 
she is, and, if so, why ? And for how long ? 

Woman prides herself on being a mystery to 
man; hut she is much more a mystery to herself. 
All through her life she asks a conundrum of man— 
and she doesn’t know its answer, or whether it has 
any answer. She may have a mind of her own; but 
she is doubtful whether she has a soul. And if she 
had a soul she wouldn’t exactly know what to do 
with it. On the whole she is more comfortable with¬ 
out a soul; there are times when a woman’s soul is 
rather in the way. (A woman’s soul is one of the 
things that should never be taken on a honeymoon^ 
Woman is always wondering about herself; she is 
never quite sure who or what she will be the next 

xiii 


XIV 


Preface No. II 


minute. When we recall that every girl in the world 
hopes to be Mrs. Somebody Else, and will even cheer¬ 
fully change her name to Mrs. Manglewurtzel if 
Horace Manglewurtzel has nice dreamy eyes, and 
will sink her identity by putting on a wedding ring, 
it is obvious that her soul is something that she is apt 
to lose or mislay. And even if she possessed a soul 
it would expire of dizziness, for every woman 
changes her identity every time she puts on a new 
dress or another hat. 

By the way, have you ever noticed your nicest 
woman friend trying on a new hat? That is the 
one moment when a woman really reveals herself. 
As she looks at herself in the mirror, sideways, 
backways and reflected in another mirror, she in¬ 
stinctively assumes her best face. 

THE NEW HAT EXPRESSION 

Every woman has a new face for every occasion; 
but none is quite so charming as the face that she 
wears the first time under a new hat. Then you see 
your dearest friend exactly as she wants you to see 
her. She beams at herself in the mirror with an 
expression of perfect sweetness, though, of course, 
it is often a wrench to the rest of her features. It 
is innocence at its best—with a hint of wickedness, a 
touch of the delightful devil. 

The sad thing about the Hew Hat Expression is 


XV 


For Women Only 

that it never lasts. She forgets her face, or mislays 
its lure. But that face is the face your woman friend 
intends to lead up to a proposal; that is the face 
she means to be married in. 

Any woman is another woman when she gets into 
another dress. You must have noticed that yourself. 
You may be tired after a strenuous day of shopping, 
a duty out of which you make a business, a business 
out of which you contrive to exact the keenest thrills. 
You may feel tired out, all your aspirations reduced 
to an aspirin; but do you flop into a kimono or a 
neglige? No; you “change”; you doll up. You get 
into something smart—and you are smart. When 
you change your dress you change your soul. Even 
high-heeled shoes, provided that they are the latest 
last, are more of a rest for tired feet than felt slip¬ 
pers. That tired feeling can always be cured by a 
diamond tiara; the best relief for jaded nerves is a 
jade necklace. 

Woman cherishes her profound ignorance of her¬ 
self; she prides her inability to explain herself. 
Provided her mystery makes her mysterious to men 
she does not worry about it. 

She thinks herself a Sphinx, eternally asking her¬ 
self the conundrum of herself—and she doesn’t care 
in the least if the answer is a lemon. She exists in 
a beautiful haze; she haloes herself in iridescent 
vagueness. 


XVI 


Preface No. II 


Yet beneath her apparent vacillations woman 
knows, deep down in her subconsciousness, exactly 
what she wants; and despite her hesitations she 
moves unconsciously directly to her goal. Nature 
has endowed her with the faculty of getting there. 

There are only two facts of her existence of which 
she is profoundly sure. 

1. She knows that if she had the chances that 
other women had she would be a movie queen, a 
world-famous vamp, or an actress of genius—not 
too much genius, of course, but just sufficient to 
make her of a most amazing attractiveness to all 
men. 

2. She knows that she is either too fat or too thin. 
Usually too fat. 

WHERE WOMAN KEEPS HER BRAINS 

While men, poor limited things, have to make use 
of their brains to win success in this life, woman’-s 
brains are not tucked away inside her skull, where 
they can’t be seen, but spread in a thin layer all over 
the outside of her body. That, of course, is the 
nicest place for them to be. Her brains are her 
figure and her beauty. And wisely she does not 
attempt to compete with men with the modicum of 
dull gray brain that she keeps inside her pretty head. 
Her brains are all displayed in the shop-window, 
invitingly arranged. They are ticketed “complex- 


For Women Only xvii 

ion,” “figure,” “hair,” “skin,” “beauty,” “attract¬ 
iveness,” “charm,” “youth,” “sex.” 

For with her wonderfully specialized brain she 
has to win her way in this life, to admiration, desire, 
success, fortune, or merely a husband. And the 
little brain securely packed inside her skull is of use 
to her only to minister to the purposes of her larger 
and more obvious brain surfaces. That specialized 
brain is her sole equipment; and it usually suffices. 
She has a shop-window soul; no wonder that men 
delight in gazing at that window. 

While a man can make his chances to rise, while 
he can force himself upon the world by mere brain¬ 
power, character, or bluff, the average woman seldom 
gets her chance to lift herself out of the rut of insig¬ 
nificance. The audience of her charms and her lure 
is usually a restricted one. She cannot display her 
figure or her beauty of face, or that much mightier 
lure, her sex appeal, to the world. Before she 
knows it she is married off to some man; and thence¬ 
forth her future is his. Her career has led her only 
to the altar; her march through life is only “The 
Wedding March”; and thereafter her personality is 
known to only one man, and her future is committed 
into the incompetent hands of her husband and her 
children. 

So she looks with envy at the fortunate few who 
achieve the whole world for their audience. The 


xviii Preface No. II 

queens of the film or the stage, even the great cour¬ 
tesans, arouse the instinctive jealousy of the good 
woman. If only she had had their chance! Hence 
her desire to display herself—and the celluloid 
screen, the theatre, or the witness box in the divorce 
court is the only chance of advertisement that she 
gets. It is a commonplace of observation that the 
divorced woman is inundated with offers of marriage. 

It is a fortunate thing that all divorce judges are 
married men. 

Woman’s beauty and charm are her substitutes for 
the brains on which mere man puts such great store; 
and having the substitutes, she never feels the lack 
of the real thing. 


DOGGED BY THE DOUBLE CHIN 

The second basic fact of which woman is sure is 
that her weight is never just right. The compiler of 
this book has never met a single woman who would 
acknowledge that she wasn’t just a trifle too fat or 
too thin. And he never expects to meet a married 
one. All her life woman is dogged by the destiny of 
a double chin. It is the Face at the Window that is 
always glaring at her—the face with the double 
chin! 

Beyond these two facts women are utterly ignor¬ 
ant of themselves. They know nothing about them- 


XIX 


For Women Only 

selves or why they do it. They act on instinct; but 
instinct works out in a curious and perplexing 
fashion. 

Why does a girl prefer a large, coarse, rich, 
middle-aged man to play the part of Romeo to her 
Juliet, instead of a beautiful and youthful, but pov¬ 
erty-stricken poet ? The poet would understand her 
so much better. That is why. 

Woman doesn’t believe in taking any chances of 
being found out—too soon. She prefers to enter 
married life without a passport; she carries no iden¬ 
tification disc. Her wedding ring is merely her hus¬ 
band’s identification disc. She has a contempt for 
the man who understands her—because she knows 
how little there is in her to understand. 

Yet woman longs for romance—and with a sure 
instinct looks for it in the rude, coarse caveman. 
Have you noticed that every movie heroine fades 
out in the arms of the sort of man who has won her 
by being rude to her—and will certainly go on being 
rude to her when the two are demobbed after the 
wedding march ? Deep in her prehistoric heart she 
likes men being rude to her. The only argument that 
convinces her is the argument of the savage’s club; 
and she does not insist on a club of gold. Unfortu¬ 
nately there is now a world-shortage of cave men; 
there has been a tremendous increase in the demand; 
and there aren’t nearly enough of them to go round, 


XX 


Preface No. II 


probably because so many of them have been bought 
up by the novelists and the films for heroes. 

The worst insult a lover can offer a woman is to 
understand her, to pity her, to forgive her. No 
woman can ever forgive a man who understands 
her; it cheapens her in his eyes, she thinks. The 
wise lover understands her, but he doesn’t let on. 


WHYS FOR WOMEN 

Yet, however much a girl may be in love with a 
man, why, when she means to be particularly nice to 
him, does she find herself being particularly nasty? 

Why is every mother jealous of her daughter, 
especially her married daughter? 

Why do women discuss and compare their own 
husbands, while men never think of their wives as a 
topic of conversation with other married men? Is 
it because all wives have a feeling deep in their 
hearts that, after all, they haven’t got the best hus¬ 
band in the market, or that they have paid too dear 
for him ? 

Why does a woman insist on showing everybody 
her shoulders and as much of the top portion of her¬ 
self as she can, while she considers her legs sacred ? 

Why does she shudder at any reference to the 
natural function of her breasts ? Why is it a compli¬ 
ment to speak of her curves, while it is the deepest of 


Preface No. II xxi 

insults to suggest the uses for which Nature designed 
those curves? 

Why are women shocked at the nude in modern 
dress and yet strive to get as near to it as possible ? 
Nearer, really, for the modern costume covers a mul¬ 
titude of suggestions. 

And why, considering her imperfections, does man 
fall in love with her ? 

And why—the unanswerable why—does she fall 
in love with us men ? 

See “Guide Book to Women” Chapters I to X. 


* 


9 



GUIDE BOOK TO 
WOMEN 




GUIDE BOOK TO WOMEN 


CHAPTER I. 

WOMAN : HER BEAUTY 

W HEN we speak of Women—just like that— 
instinctively we picture something young and 
curving and luring and luscious. Instantly we pic¬ 
ture Her—not Them. We never think of old women, 
Bcraggy women, members of the Society of Preven¬ 
tion of Cruelty to Animals, busy women, scientific 
women, unattractive women. 

The word “Woman” does not call to our eager 
minds the picture of the washer-lady, or the cook, 
or the office-cleaner, or the mother of seven, or the 
woman you see in the tram, or the farmer’s wife, or 
any of the host of capable and incapable women who 
make up the population of half the globe. The last 
person a man thinks of when the word “Women” is 
mentioned is his grandmother. And there are men 
who at the utterance of the word would not think of 
their wives. 

Women to us are the beautiful faces and the 



2 


Guide Book to Women 


appealing eyes and the curving, but not too curving, 
figure and the mouth that mutely asks to be kissed 
and the body that seems to lack the support of our 
arms. Women mean the low neck and the short 
skirts and all between these two degrees of latitude 
—especially in these days when there is so much 
latitude. Women mean youth and freshness and 
charm, and just a discreet hint of wickedness. 
Woman exists only in our hearts as the Continual 
Lure, the Persistent Disturber, the Everlasting 
Interrogation. She swims through our imaginations 
as the personification of desire; she is merely the 
object of our love. All the rest of her can go hang. 
The other ones, the useful and capable ones, of which 
the great bulk of womankind is made up, do not 
exist for us, though they are of some use in the 
population statistics. 

Woman to us is beauty, attractiveness and rounded 
youth. And that is just what she is to herself. All 
these attributes she cherishes far above rubies—and 
none of them last as long as rubies. Her one talent, 
beauty, she bears through the world; it is all she has; 
and it blossoms, fades and dies; but is there any¬ 
thing else in this life of ours that is as wonderful or 
as precious ? 

Watch any stream of women passing through the 
streets of any town. Count the beautiful ones as 
they pass. Will you find one in a hundred? Count 


3 


Woman: Her Beauty 

the pleasing ones, with some grace or little charm of 
expression or face or complexion or figure or hear¬ 
ing. Will you find one in a score? 

The great gift of woman’s beauty is a rare gift. 
Otherwise that gift, staled by custom, would be value¬ 
less. 

Yet, you will say, apply the same test of personal 
beauty to a stream of male pedestrians. Would the 
beautiful man he found in a hundred ? 

Yes, but man does not depend upon his beauty 
for his existence, except the cinema star or the mati¬ 
nee idol. Man makes no claim to personal beauty. 
Some of them may have beautiful minds; but 
beauty is not his game. A graceful moustache never 
got any man promotion in business or in love. So 
now we can start fair on the question whether woman 
is beautiful, and why? 

THE SHORT-LEGGED BIPED 

Woman is a short-legged biped. Yes, that is just 
what your Enid or your Muriel or your Alice is. 
That delightful, lissom, luring dream of a girl who 
just passed you in the street was merely a short¬ 
legged biped. She had concealed the fact as much as 
possible by shifting her waist up to where it had no 
right to be and adding two inches to her heels. 

Her shortness of leg is woman’s greatest worry. 


4 


Guide Book to Women 


That strange, absent look that occurs in the eyes of 
even the girl or girls who love us is perhaps due to 
the recognition of despair that nothing she can do 
will add a cubit to her thighs. But more probably 
that sudden anxiety in her eyes is due to the desola¬ 
ting feeling that attacks all women at frequent inter¬ 
vals—her eternal wonder whether her blouse is all 
right at the back. 

The high-heeled shoe adds to her apparent height 
—all women parade this world two inches higher 
than they are—but it doesn’t lengthen her legs. All 
it does is to make woman’s progression clumsy and 
graceless. Watch any woman’s widely swinging arm 
as she walks. That ceaseless, energetic see-saw of 
her arm is merely her attempt to balance herself as 
she wobbles on her toes. 

If you want to see woman as she would like to 
be, glance at the fashion advertisements. The ideal 
woman, conceived by the fashion artists, is never less 
than nine feet in height, and most of the cubits she 
has added to her stature are composed of elongated 
leg. Woman really likes having her leg pulled. The 
ideal fashion woman has no bumps and few curves. 
She is as straight as a ladder, and nearly as long. 
She runs to leg and eliminates her hips. In short, 
she is a long-legged monoped. A monoped is an ani¬ 
mal that has only one leg. And really there doesn’t 
seem much room for any bifurcation within that slim 


.Woman: Her Beauty 5 

and creaseless gown. This giraffe-like silhouette, 
this ladder of elegance is what a woman yearns to 
be; and when she buys a dress she sees herself, with 
all her bumps eliminated, and legs stretched a yard 
longer, gliding gracefully through an admiring 
world, with a beautiful but inane simper on her 
expressionless face. 

WOMAN IS BARREL-SHAPED 

The rest of her is satisfying but not artistically 
ideal. In woman the greatest diameter is some 
degrees below her equator, though there are excep¬ 
tions who show more latitude in their northern 
hemisphere. Her general form is that of the Greek 
amphora, with the centre of gravity well down, and 
tapering to the top and the bottom. A barrel is 
not a particularly alluring object, yet it is to this 
general shape, excluding, for the present, her sur¬ 
face bumps, that she approximates. Yet no one 
objects to the shape of a barrel when it is full of 
beer; and all students of the sex should hear in mind 
that the other barrel is full of woman. 

Yet artists delight in painting, and sculptors in 
sculpting, this barrel-shaped figure, especially in the 
nude. But it must be remembered that most artists 
are male. 

When one comes to details it must be admitted 
that the curves and contours of women are full of 


6 


Guide Book to Women 


beauty; and though woman shares with the child 
her softness and smoothness of flesh she beats the 
baby at the baby’s own game. But one portion of 
her beauty woman has deliberately ruined. She has 
destroyed her feet. China taught her how to do it. 
She crumples up her pretty toes into a shoe too 
small for them; she spoils their shape by compel¬ 
ling herself to trot on her toes; and on their beauty 
she cultivates a perennial crop of corns and bunions. 
She manicures her nails but never manages to cure 
her toes. 

Ah, but her face! Woman’s face has one advan¬ 
tage over man’s. She can drape it, or frame it, or 
adorn it, with her halo of hair. She makes herself a 
new beauty, or a new ugliness, every time she does 
her hair. And when she lets it down—! Man can 
merely disguise himself in whiskers, if he dares. 

All women’s hair is curly; and, as most of it isn’t, 
she does her best with curling pins and marcelle 
waves. The question at what precise moment a 
honeymoon ceases and marriage begins is easily 
decided. It is the moment when the bridegroom dis¬ 
covers his bride in curling pins. And divorce looms 
near when a wife doesn’t bother to fluff her hair 
about her forehead after having pig-tailed it for the 
night in bed. 

Yet with that profuse vegetable growth on the top 
of her head a woman can work marvels. With a 


Woman: Her Beauty 7 

single straying curl she can provide herself with 
free board and lodging for the rest of her life. 

Woman’s beauty, however, is not made up of sim¬ 
ple facts like a beautiful face or a scrumptious figure, 
nice eyes or a kissable mouth, a tantalizing nose or a 
cheeky chin, the complexion of her mind or of her 
face, her rounded breasts or her nubbly knees. It is 
something more elusive and more alluring than these 
mere accessories. It lies in her vivacity of mind and 
body, the variety of her expressions and her actions, 
her instinctive charm and grace, her ever-present but 
unconscious sex appeal. 

f Man is an uncouth brute compared with hen) 
JBut she likes him uncouth. A woman cannot help 
being graceful in all her instinctive movements. She 
waves her hand to you with a wonderful unstudied 
art. Her smile or her pout are grace-notes in the 
rhythmic harmony of herself. She reflects on her 
mobile face and in her lissom figure every thought 
that passes through her canary mind. 

She is infinite variety. She talks not only with 
her face but with the whole of her body. As the 
famous Chinese poet, Mieh Hat, who flourished 
before Confucius, said: 

/ “You never find two alike any one time; 

\ You never find one alike twice!” 

V J 

A woman can even weep beautifully; and her 


8 


Guide Book to Women 


anger lias a tiger-like attractiveness. Thougli the 
men who like a dog may disagree, the general opin¬ 
ion of mankind is that there is no animal pet that 
compares with a woman pet. You never come to 
the end of her tricks; she is always an exciting thing 
to keep about the house. The only disadvantage is 
that you never know when you have her; but that 
keeps her owner pleasantly guessing. 

Woman’s beauty is merely her womanishness; 
and the more womanish she is the better you like her. 
But her highest charm is that she never grows up. 
She may grow fat, but she never grows up. 

TIME AND FAT 

But woman’s beauty, at least as far as her acces¬ 
sories are concerned, is almost as fleeting as herself. 
For that ever-changing beauty three dreadful things 
lie in wait. There are three monsters in her path 
through Life. (1) Time, (2) Fat and (3) The 
Double Chin. 

A woman can keep her face tidy and wrinkleless 
provided she isn’t a woman. To preserve her infan¬ 
tile rounded charm of feature and expression she 
must never allow any expression to creep into her 
face. But the sacrifice is too great. No real 
woman thinks more of her lines on her face than of 
the thousand languages she can talk with it. 

Time is woman’s worst enemy. Nature, who gives 


Woman: Her Beauty 9 

woman her precocious charm of curve and line and 
colour and lusciousness, gets even with her long 
before Nature gets even with men. Nature means 
woman to have a good time, but always to get in out 
of the wet good and early. Nature has, it is sad to 
say, only one use for woman; and when woman is no 
longer fit for that use Nature has no further concern 
with her. She lets women flop, and turns with 
delight to the new crop of feminine babies. 

women's MURDERER 

Nature is cruel, especially to women. Nature 
fixes woman’s span of usefulness for her practical 
purposes when little more than half a woman’s life is 
over. She casts woman out when the dear thing’s 
brain and her heart are only beginning to be of value. 
For Nature has no use for woman’s brain. Origi¬ 
nally the cruel autocrat of woman’s life meant,no 
doubt, to kill off all women at middle-age; but being 
a careless and neglectful old lady, she simply forgot 
all about this half of the world. 

On the other hand, Nature meant woman to make 
the most use of her life. She develops her into a 
woman long before she makes a man out of a boy. 
She gives woman a precocious brain specially devel¬ 
oped along certain lines. She endows a girl with 
every lure and charm to fulfil her duty, which is to 


10 


Guide Book to Women 


love and bear children. The trouble is that many 
a girl thinks she is thus specially favoured only that 
she may have a good time. 

But all these extras that are lent to her wear out. 
Time is her enemy. And woman knows it. She 
fights her murderer with every weapon in her 
armoury, plus those supplied by' the beauty special¬ 
ists. 

She bestows upon her complexion the care that a 
man bestows upon his career. She protects it from 
the sunshine, the wind and the rain. She enables the 
beauty specialists and the chemists to retire with 
fortunes. It is her incessant preoccupation. 

She goes to bed with her face smothered in creams 
and skin foods even on her honeymoon. (Advice to 
a bride: never make a complexion cream a third on 
your honeymoon trip.) Powder adds a daintiness to 
a pretty face and rouge adds flavour to a kiss; but 
both are ultimately fatal. 

For the saddening fact is that all this jealous care 
does not improve a woman’s complexion. Compare 
a man’s complexion. He takes not the slightest care 
of it; he lets the wind and the rain and the sunshine 
play havoc with it. And yet when a man is middle- 
aged he still has his complexion, while his middle- 
aged wife has to put hers on. 

The plain fact is that women’s complexions were 
meant for outdoor wear. The sun and the wind and 


II 


L Woman: Her Beauty 

the rain are the best complexion cures. All skins are 
built the same way, and react in the same way. Na¬ 
ture will look after your complexion if you give Na¬ 
ture the opportunity. But it is hard to refrain from 
touching up when you see your dearest friend’s latest 
complexion. 


FAT 

Woman’s second enemy is Fat. Have you ever 
paused to consider that half of woman’s beauty is 
adipose tissue? The plump arm is a scraggy arm, 
plus fat. The nestless neck is merely due to an extra 
layer of fat, filling the natural hollows seen in a 
man’s neck. The swelling breast, the boneless waist, 
the voluptuous hips, the nubbly knee owe their gra¬ 
cious curves and yielding softness to a covering of 
fatty matter. 

Woman is provided with an extra ration of fat 
for obvious purposes: to have a reserve handy for her 
duties to her young; and to increase woman’s lure of 
softness and curves for man. 

But by the time that a woman has fulfilled her 
purpose, which is incidentally Nature’s purpose, fat 
has got into her system; and it settles there. The 
rest of her life is a bitter and remorseless battle 
against the enemy she carries in her neck and her 
hips. Or else it is a fat and apathetic acquiescence 


12 


Guide Book to Women 


in what she wrongly regards as her universal fate. 

She has sometimes an ally that comes to her aid. 
The only sure anti-fat cure is one that is never adver¬ 
tised, and one that any woman can procure for 
nothing. Its trade name is Worry. Many an un¬ 
happy marriage has saved a hopeless wife from her 
worst enemy. Worry and grow thin. 

For the rest of womankind there is, however, 
another way out. That is to eat and grow thin. 
Excessive fat is often merely a question of diet; for 
women are greedier than men. There are hooks 
about this cure, hut this is not one of them. But 
any woman can by careful diet take pounds off her 
hips. A has! that middle-aged spread! And how 
much happier the world would be! 

Why trouble ? asks the comfortably married 
woman, serenely reposing in the belief that she is 
merely “a fine figure of a woman,” and refusing, in 
the way women have, to believe her mirror. Too many 
women regard marriage as the end of their struggles. 
They have got their man and their hoard and lodging 
and someone to pay their dress hills. 

So many a man who married a willowy and 
luscious bride finds that the goods he purchased are 
not the goods that he took with him on his honey¬ 
moon. And he can’t return them. 

It is also true that the slim young fellow, madam, 
you married becomes a prosperous club man with a 


Woman: Her Beauty 13 

waist that requires diplomacy on the part of his 
tailor, and a complexion that he tries to cure with 
whiskey. But the majority, of husbands do not run 
to fat, and the majority of you mesdames do. 

Of course, marriage is to blame. When you do 
your duty and bear a child, or a family, Nature inter¬ 
feres with your figure. She takes liberties with 
your young breasts and fills out your waist. These 
alterations in your figure make fortunes for the 
corset makers and the manufacturers of bust bodies; 
but Nature insists on a heavy penalty when you do 
her behests. 

The truth of the matter is that life gives women 
the wrong end of the stick; woman gets the worst 
of it. What man would put up with the messy busi¬ 
ness of looking after young babies ? And what hus¬ 
band really appreciates what the mother of his chil¬ 
dren does for them ? And what wife would permit 
her husband to do the dirty work ? 

Many old and wise nations recognize woman’s 
proneness to fat; and simply save themselves any 
worry by seeing beauty in fat. The fatter the more 
lovely. The Chinese thus kindly take the sting out 
of woman’s fate and fatness by telling their wives 
that they like it. And as they have been telling 
their wives this for thousands of years they have 
convinced themselves that they like it. 

As Keats says: 


14 


Guide Book to Women 


“Beauty is Fat, Fat beauty. That is all 
We know, and all we need know.” 

HIPS 

The question of hips perhaps comes in here. 
Every woman has hips, quite obviously has them, yet 
no woman will admit their existence. It is as if a 
circle refused to recognize its own circumference. 
Every new change of fashion is loudly announced 
as doing away with the superfluous hip. But the 
hip comes back. 

The double chin that dogs woman throughout all 
her career is merely one of woman’s charms grown 
up. The small chin of a girl is a delightful finish to 
a youthful rounded face; the double chin into which 
it develops is the dead finish to a middle-aged face. 
Bone in a woman’s chin would be as fatal to marriage 
as bone in a patrician nose. What a man instinct¬ 
ively desires is the soft and rounded—and weak— 
chin in the girl he kisses. The other kind of chin 
is apt to get in his way. And being a practical per¬ 
son he gets out of its way. 

As the rounded chin has so little bone to build 
on, it takes on fat. And the fat settles there. Some¬ 
times the double chin is really triplets. It is a curi¬ 
ous thing that the fattest pearls are always to be 
found under the fattest chin. 

Yet there is hope even for the hopeless double 


i5 


Woman: Her Beauty 

chin. For in Wells’ “Outline of History” he pub¬ 
lishes two portraits of Cleopatra; and one looks like 
the lady who conies to do the washing, and doesn’t 
know anything better about doing her hair than to 
screw it back off her face; and the other, a bas-relief 
by a popular society portrait sculptor of Egypt in 
those days, discloses the awful fact that she owns an 
obvious double chin. Of course, we do not know 
what happened to that sculptor when Cleopatra saw 
it; but as far as Antony was concerned Cleopatra got 
away with it. Possibly she had other charms. 

DOES BEAUTY MATTER? 

Are women beautiful ? Perhaps not, if you coldly 
examine them. But women are not meant to be 
examined at all. They are meant to be loved. And 
the statistics show that they are. As being designed 
to be loved they have all the necessary attributes and 
six hundred and forty-nine extra ones. No portrait 
ever does a woman justice, or even mercy. She needs 
to be alive in a cinema film. 

And if you examine the wives that your men 
friends have married you will find that they were not 
chosen for their beauty or their flawless figure. 

The ugly girl gets her man just as easily as the 
pretty one does. She may not get the man the 
pretty girl got, but she gets a fair sample. Beauty of 


16 Guide Book to Women 


face or beauty of figure are nothing compared to 
woman’s unconscious sex appeal. And, thank good¬ 
ness, women are built that way. They do appeal. 
They know their job. 

What young man pauses to reflect that the girl he 
is kissing, or wanting to kiss, is a short-legged biped 
with a tendency toward adipose tissue ? Who worries 
over her feet or her ears when she says, “You 
mustn’t!” in a way that means you must? When 
you gaze into her eyes do you see the stout matron 
you are proposing to make her? No; you see para¬ 
dise. And you are right every time. 

What does it matter whether woman is beautiful 
or not, as long as she is there to kiss? And no 
woman was ever ugly when she was being kissed. 

Then, husbands, keep on kissing her! 


CHAPTER II 


WOMAN; HER DRESS 


TT T HEIST Eve put 
- \ Y Adam sat up 



Before that Adam had vaguely noticed her about 
the garden. She was useful about the cave and had 
proved herself a willing but quite incompetent cook. 
She seemed to spend an unconscionable time drying 
her hair and she always wanted to know everywhere 
he had been, and why. But, for the rest, she was 
company and more biddable than the brontosaurus. 

But when she came rushing in to show him how 
well her new fig-leaf fitted and how smart it looked, 
Adam dimly perceived that here was some new per¬ 
son quite unlike the old Eve. It worried him. 

And that fig-leaf has worried us ever since. 
Woman’s dress perturbs us; it diverts our minds 
from important subjects like astronomy and ethics 
and proportional representation and the price of the 
favourite for the Cup and the poker hand we had 
last night; and it compels us to recognize that there 
are women in this old world. It roughly jostles us 
with the fact that here in this man-made world is 
a quite distinct sex, whose job is to poke its fingers 


17 


18 Guide Book to Women 


into the complex machinery of civilization, just for 
the fun of seeing what will happen. Its delight and 
its mission is to make fools of us, though happy fools. 
And it can dress itself out in the most absurd and 
inconvenient costumes, and not only get away with 
them, hut compel a man to pay for them. And this 
sex does that deliberately, just to impress on man that 
she is Different. 

WHY DO WOMEN DRESS ? 

Philosophers have put forward various theories to 
solve the question. “Why do women dress?” One 
theory is that a modern woman dresses to cover her 
nakedness, though not because she doesn’t think her 
nakedness nice. This theory would have more sup¬ 
port if she really did cover her nakedness and not 
leave large bare patches showing through. 

A more promising theory is that the modern 
woman dresses to uncover her nakedness; it is cer¬ 
tainly borne out by the facts. 

At this point the question comes in whether a 
woman without any clothes on is more attractive than 
a woman with, say, the small amount of covering 
material she jabs on her when she goes jazzing. 
Strictly considered the modern woman’s dress is 
merely an enlarged fig-leaf with holes in it. It has 
worn thin in some places and in others it has frayed 
right off. Perhaps the fact of the high cost of fig- 


Woman: Her Dress 


19 

leaves is to blame. The question whether a woman 
is more attractive with some of her clothes on than 
with none has been exhaustively studied by the 
ancient Thibetan philosopher, Vstst (circa B.C. 
2609), who on the last page of his monumental work 
stated his final conclusion that all women were more 
attractive in the dark. However, as Vstst was not 
married, this judgment is open to doubt. 

Does woman dress to keep herself warm? Or to 
cover herself up ? Or to attract the attention of men ? 
Or to put one over the other woman ? Or just pure 
cussedness ? 

If it is to keep herself warm, certain parts of her 
are much more susceptible to cold than the parts you 
would suspect. While a woman will clothe herself 
on a cold day in furs, she covers her legs with the 
thinnest of silk stockings, and her feet with the thin¬ 
nest soled shoes. 

Even on the coldest day she must have air for her 
neck and shoulders—and nowadays her back. Then 
when the whim, or her husband’s money, takes her, 
she will fling over those exposed portions a heavy 
fur. Any woman glows all over when she wears a 
hundred guinea stole. 

Woman is a clothes-conscious race. Man puts on 
any old thing and forgets all about it. It is only 
when he has a new suit on that he worries; and that 
is only because its fit or something different about 


20 Guide Book to Women 


its cut keeps reminding him that he is uncomfortable. 
And he goes about all day in a paralysing fear that 
some of his male friends will notice that his suit is 
new. 

A woman, however, feels all her clothes all the 
time she is wearing them. And not only the clothes 
which nestle closest to her skin. She may be wear¬ 
ing her old ones underneath, hut if she has a new 
outer dress on she feels it in every inch of her cuti¬ 
cle. For her skin, as we have seen, is merely woman’s 
specialized brain, spread thin all over her. 

When you are pouring adoration over her, one 
part of her brain, the part within her cranium, at¬ 
tends to you as much as she can, but the other and 
larger part of her brain is all the time preoccupied 
with its much more important business. 

THE PART SHE CAN'T SEE 

Women’s clothes are hooked on to her or tied on 
with strings. She is specially built for tying things 
on to her. That is her natural instinct; but the hook 
and eye saves time. But not trouble. Every woman 
goes from her girlhood to her grave harbouring grave 
suspicions of her hooks and eyes. For women dress 
back to front. Most of her attire depends on attach¬ 
ments that happen on her back. She deliberately 
goes out of her way to hook things where she can’t 


Woman: Her Dress 


21 


get at the hooks. Husbands know—or if they don’t 
they have to learn. 

So woman goes through her life with always a 
worry at the back of her head about what is happen¬ 
ing at the hack of her dress. There are always dread¬ 
ful possibilities about the part of her attire that she 
can’t see. Ho woman is really certain for fifteen 
minutes at a time that her blouse isn’t gaping or a 
placket hole hasn’t come undone—or worse. The 
only garment in which she feels perfect confidence is 
her nightie. That has merely to be slipped on—or 
off. And judging from most nighties it doesn’t really 
matter whether it is on or off. 

So while a woman is looking into your eyes with 
that soulful gaze that so entrances you, her alert 
little mind is wondering anxiously about her hack- 
hair and her hack. Her fingers are always going on 
little tentative excursions just to feel that things are 
all right behind; her hair is always being patted 
and her blouse twitched straight. She gives to your 
compliments a bird-like attention, but she has more 
serious business. And she has developed that double 
consciousness to such a pitch that she is able to make 
you believe that her every thought is for you. And 
that is nice of her. 

But this continual preoccupation about her hack 
view is merely a habit. Her wildest excitement 
comes when she is wearing a new dress, or merely a 


22 


Guide Book to Women 


new camisole. She feels every new article she has 
on every second. Even a new pair of silk stockings 
sends a continual wireless message to her legs. She 
is not merely wearing them; she is living them. 

Even when a woman has on new things that no 
man, except her husband, is meant to see, she feels a 
fine glow of happiness. It is a private happiness, 
hugged to herself! but she can’t help being blissfully 
conscious of it. 

Every woman when she has on a new dress or a 
new corset feels herself the centre of the universe. 
She stands basking in the spotlight; she is a closeup 
in a film play; she is the heroine of a famous novel; 
she is a queen of a history. And when she goes home 
and carefully and regretfully takes her things off she 
feels a deep depression. The ideal life for a modem 
woman would be to wear a complete new outfit every 
day. But the excitement would wear her out. 

BREAKING IN THE CORSET 

Why woman ever compressed her lissom form into 
a corset is a subject that should be carefully studied 
by philosophers. She is all curves, all clingsomeness, 
all delicious softness. And she deliberately encases 
this chocolate cream of her body in a stiff and unre¬ 
sponsive sheath. She claims that it supports her 
figure—her figure that needs no support except that 


Woman: Her Dress 23 

of a masculine arm. Perhaps it is a substitute for 
a missing masculine arm. 

And the manufacturers of corsets, knowing that 
women dress backwards, went on making corsets that 
laced up the back. The man who invented a corset 
that laced in the front, where women could get at it 
in comfort, was a genius; but it is doubtful whether 
he really made money out of the thing. He had not 
calculated upon woman’s incurable preference for 
fumbling with fastenings at her back. 

But the great ice-age of the corset is rapidly com¬ 
ing to an end. Bits have been cut off the top of the 
corset and large slabs of bone removed from the 
bottom of it, until now it is merely a few ribbons and 
openwork. When you jazz with a girl you clasp 
something human, not a steel cuirass. Woman is 
rapidly coming out of her whalebone shell. She is 
really there, beneath her clothes. The whole top of 
her is out now. The modem corset is creeping down 
her legs. 


A TRANSPARENT FICTION 

Not that the modern woman’s clothes really matter. 
The outer layer is usually transparent—to enable 
you to notice the next layer. And the next layer is 
invariably open work—to afford you to peep at the 
third layer. That layer has usually pink ribbons 


24 Guide Book to Women 

placed in exciting places—to encourage the mascu¬ 
line eye to continue its explorations. Thus through 
filmy strata after strata you descend until you come 
on portions of bed-rock, just glimpses of it, of course, 
hut sufficient evidence to convince you that there is 
no further need for exploration. Underneath is real 
girl. 

No one would say that a woman would arrange her 
layers thus deliberately to entice the masculine eye. 

There was a time when women depended on their 
shoulders to hang the top parts of their dress upon. 
Women quite recently wore braces. True, they were 
made of ribbon and floral garlands and bows; but 
fundamentally they were braces that men wear. 
Now, however, they have discovered that for evening 
dress they need not depend on braces. There are 
awkward moments, of course, when the corsage fails 
to defeat the laws of gravity; but no honourable man 
would look. 

The result in the stalls of a theatre, seen from 
behind, is that you see nothing above the seats but 
nakedness. There are occasions when the student for 
one mad moment thinks he is looking at an array of 
girls in their baths. And this is to be deprecated; 
for such a display of nudity of shoulders and backs is 
apt to distract the thoughtful patron of the drama 
from the stage. 

And at a dinner party you would have to look 


Woman: Her Dress 25 

under the table to find out what the women wore. 
Though, of course, no gentleman would. 

Not only is a woman clothes-conscious of herself, 
hut of every other woman. You are strolling with 
a girl in the street, and another woman passes you. 
The girl continues to chatter, though her eyes glance 
for a moment at the stranger. But in that one 
moment the girl has summed up the stranger’s cos¬ 
tume. She knows exactly what it cost, whether it 
is a model, where she bought it, how much stuff there 
is in it, where she got the trimming and the price per 
yard, what her hat cost and whether it suits her, how 
much she paid for those stockings and those shoes, 
and the autumn sale where she got them, whether 
her corset is the correct shape, whether it is old or 
new, whether she is married and where she got her 
lip-salve, and whether she’ll get a costume that style 
or not. 

All this, remember, in one fleeting glance—and 
without a symptom of her attention wandering from 
the nice things she is saying to you. It is all a case 
of woman’s specialized brains. 

Here—it has just occurred to the conscientious 
compiler—it may be advisable to explain for the 
student what clothes a woman wears. The shop win¬ 
dows can tell us much, of course* 


26 Guide Book to Women 


WHAT EVERY WOMAN WEARS 

Outside she wears a dress, or a tailor-made, or a 
gown, or a frock, or a model, or a coat and skirt, or 
a blouse and skirt, or any old thing or new thing. 
This outer covering she ties on or hooks on or throws 
on. The latest gowns are simply flung at her, and 
stick. 

There is a fortune awaiting the man who invents a 
postage-stamp that will stick an evening dress on 
to a bare patch of skin so that it won’t come un¬ 
gummed after a whole evening’s jazzing. 

For evening wear she merely drapes herself and 
suspends her gown on nothing. She grows up out 
of it like a blossom out of its calyx. In days not 
long past a woman in evening dress went through 
the evening in the fear—or hope—that her shoulder 
strap might slip down and reveal a few extra square 
inches of nude niceness. How she disdains shoulder 
straps, and nothing happens. It just shows that the 
world moves, after all. The modern girl jazzes in 
bare shoulders, though you may have noticed that 
after each dance she has to readjust her top part. 
After all, it is not really secure. But then none of 
women’s garments are quite reliable. At any 
moment something might give—and give her away. 

Underneath her dress a woman wears, on the top 
part, a camisole, or bust bodice. The job of the bust 


Woman: Her Dress 


27 


bodice is to smooth out the bust—to pretend that a 
woman has but one breast. The camisole, by some 
extraordinary oversight, is tied in front, and not at 
the back. Under that is a corset, or an apology for 
a corset, or no corset. Underneath that is the femi¬ 
nine substitute for the masculine singlet or under¬ 
shirt. In evening dress, however, there is no room 
for this. 

Underneath that is just woman. 

The lower part of her dress begins beneath the 
skirt with the underskirt. Once it was called a petti¬ 
coat; and there seemed something mysterious about 
the petticoat. Nowadays there is no mystery, since 
the underskirt is usually plainly on view through the 
openwork or the thinness of the skirt. Sometimes 
under the underskirt is the under-underskirt. Its 
function, when it is worn, is to add opaqueness to the 
skirt—or, rather, to suggest an opaqueness that isn’t. 

These undergarments are not made of flannel. 
They are amply ventilated by means of openwork and 
insertions of lace, and are invariably frilly. For 
it has occurred to the bright beady brain of woman 
that the wind or other calamities might expose the 
underskirt; and if the garment is to be seen at all 
by men it ought to be attractive. 

No woman ever goes for an aeroplane flight with¬ 
out putting on clean undies. If she is to become a 
mangled wreck owing to a crash she wants to be 


28 Guide Book to Women 


mangled in clean ones—with plenty of openwork 
about them. 

“them” 

\ 

* 'Underneath these are stockings, invariably silk, 
even though the silk-worms are occasionally vegeta¬ 
rians. Higher up, tied on at the waist, are those 
articles of attire that are never mentioned except 
when they are called bloomers. The earnest student 
of womankind must not conceive these garments 
with a plural name as being any relation to those of 
the Victorian era. They have broadened consider¬ 
ably, keeping pace with the broadening of woman’s 
mind. How they bear the appearance, unless viewed 
closely, of a much flounced underskirt. Having got 
thus far the compiler feels it unnecessary to divulge 
further details. (See shop-windows.) 

There are, it is alleged, women who wear a one- 
piece costume next the skin that is termed by the 
women who wear them “corns.” They are stated to 
be comfortable, built for use, not ornament. For that 
reason they are excluded from this survey. Ho real 
modern woman wants useful clothes when she can 
afford to buy useless ones. 

The latest envelope chemise has, however, all the 
advantages of “corns,” with a lure of its own. 
Viewed from the front or the rear, this garment looks 
like a pair of “them”; but it is really a chemise, 


Woman: Her Dress 


29 


which is the French feminine for shirt. Bnt an at¬ 
tachment goes under the legs, and thus in a moment 
converts the chemise into a pair of “them.” Why 
women should want to is another matter beyond our 
scope. It seems to complicate matters. 

The earnest investigator may at this point ask 
how a woman’s stockings keep up. Once it was by 
garters. How it is by strips of elastic attached to 
the corset at one end and by metal clasps at the 
other to the top of the stockings. These are the 
hard hone-like things you feel when you sit on a 
woman’s knee. 

Underneath her arms, except when she has no 
covering on her arms, a woman wears perspiration 
absorbers. She doesn’t call them that, but that is 
their function. And for evening dress the modern 
wife finds a new use for her husband’s safety razor. 
He can never make out why it becomes periodically 
blunted. 

A woman in evening dress dares not lift her arms. 
They show too much. So every woman sneaks her 
husband’s safety razor and shaves her arm-pits. And 
when she goes sea-bathing, she finds it necessary to 
shave her legs. It is a, hard world for women, this. 

WHY WEAE BALL DRESSES 

At a modern ball there is so much exposed of a 
woman that it has sometimes seemed to the thought- 


30 Guide Book to Women 

ful observer that women might save themselves the 
worries they have over their ball-dresses by leaving 
that article at home. It is a wisp of a thing, anyhow, 
and does not weigh her down or weigh on her mind. 
It usually weighs eight ounces. 

The modem jazziste is clothed only about the 
middle portion of her figure; but the unsophisticated 
theorist is apt to assume, until he dances with her, 
that beneath that filmy thing about her waist and 
knees there are other and necessary things. Some¬ 
times there aren’t. 

The fashionable ball attire consists of a gown— 
what there is of it; but in these times even the smart¬ 
est woman has to consider the amount of dress mater¬ 
ial she can afford. But beneath that gown she may 
have no more than a corset, but that begins at the 
waist. Sometimes she wears a pair of “them,” 
reduced to the briefest of articles possible with a 
woman’s form. 

Underskirts cost money, and they are never seen. 
Why wear them ? They are apt to spoil the “hang” 
of an evening dress. They make bulk about the legs. 
They might even conceal the fact that the wearer 
had knees. The corset, however, has its uses. Its 
suspenders keep up her silk stockings. But there is 
a hiatus of bare leg between where the corset leaves 
off and the stockings begin. That, however, is always 
covered by the skirt—so that’s all right. 


Woman: Her Dress 31 

And underneath, if there is room, some women 
wear an abbreviated singlet. 

So when you take that delightful creature to fox¬ 
trot you have got in your arms a female less covered 
up than when she is in her nightgown. Between 
your clothes and her there exists just the thinnest 
layer of frock, a possible bit of lace and ribbon about 
her bust, and—that is all, at least as far as the top 
part of her is concerned, though sometimes she wears 
a band around her hair. 

Below the waist there is between you and her an 
unprotesting and squeezable corset beneath a short 
and filmy skirt, a pair of “them” reduced to the 
lowest common denominator, and some elastic and 
clasps that hold up her stockings. A woman will say 
that she hates a lot of things hanging about her, and 
she likes to feel free. And many a man will agree 
with her. 

Many philosophers have attempted to define and 
explain the fascination of jazzing. It seems a pity 
that one of them had not tried it. 

And in this costume, even on the coldest night, 
a woman will cheerfully sit out a dance under the 
stars without a shiver—except the one she gives when 
her partner kisses her. At least while he is kissing 
her he is keeping her warm, 


32 Guide Book to Women 


ANENT NIGHTIES 

At night a woman wears a nightie. This is not 
usually made of flannel. A woman’s nightie is 
usually more woman than nightie. That is appar¬ 
ently the idea. It is constructed of georgette, crepe 
de chine , or much-insertioned muslin, and must on 
no account be heavy or warm. 

Sometimes she wears pyjamas; but, dear man, 
/ do not be misled. Her pyj amas are nothing like 
your pyjamas. Hers are merely a divided nightie. 
And both nightie and pyjamas are so filmy in texture 
that a husband might be forgiven if he thought she 
had nothing on. Even then the wife would forgive 
him. 

A woman’s nightgown is not hooked up behind; 
nor is it tied on with strings. It just slips over her 
shoulders and there you are. 

As for the honeymoon nightie—but possibly there 
are some readers of this encyclopaedia who are not 
yet married! All that need be said—indeed, all that 
can be said—on this absorbing topic is that there have 
been honeymoons in which the bride, in the hurry of 
her packing up after the marriage, has forgotten to 
put in her suit case the honeymoon nightie over which 
she has spent much thought. But no bridegroom is 
a stickler for etiquette. 

Though the subject rightly belongs to a chapter 


Woman: Her Dress 


33 


devoted to woman’s amusements, her habit of chang¬ 
ing her dress needs treatment here. It has been com¬ 
puted that a woman occupies seven years of her life 
in changing her dress—in taking off one dress and 
putting on another. This loss of time is one of the 
causes of the lesser development of the woman’s 
brain. She gives to this habit the time that a man 
would devote to bimetalism or poker. 

A woman breakfasts in one costume and goes out 
shopping in another. She comes home, and changes 
again, for the afternoon. For dinner she must have 
another dress, and for bed she puts on another. And 
all these changes need a change of hair-dressing. 
Woman goes through thirteen per cent of her 
existence with her fingers fumbling behind her back 
and with hair-pins in her mouth. This is a loss 
of national efficiency that, considered statistically, is 
appalling. But then who ever considered women 
statistically ? 

Add to this the number of hours per diem a woman 
devotes to thoughts of dress, to a consideration of 
prices and bargains, to getting “tried on,” and to 
the thoughtful student of the sex it seems miraculous 
that a woman ever has time to get married or to have 
a baby. Still, half the fun of having a baby is 
thinking how she will dress it—and herself—when 
it is bom. But how much more exciting it would 
be for the mother if a boy-baby required little blue 


34 Guide Book to Women 

silk trousers and a baby-girl bad to wear pink silk 
early-Victorian drawers! The extra expense of 
preparation would be well worth it. But all babies, 
like all dolls, are born little girls. 

Until a girl gets engaged she thinks more of the 
man than she does of her clothes ; but once the 
wedding is settled he fades from her mind. She 
can’t give him much of her time; she has to think 
about her trousseau. At times, in the midst of 
choosing her wedding-gown, she forgets all about 
him. And when the foolish fellow intrudes for a 
kiss to keep him going till the wedding-day, he has 
to stalk her through a foaming archipelago of 
trousseau. 


WHY FASHIONS CHANGE 

And now we come to fashions. Why is there 
always a new fashion every three months or so ? Be¬ 
cause woman simply hasn’t got a thing to wear ? 
Because she wants something new? Because she is 
sick and tired of that old gown ? Because she hates 
to be the same person for longer than three 
months at a time ? Because she can’t wear a winter 
dress in the summer ? Because furs are in, or bebe- 
ribbons are out ? 

For none of these convincing reasons. Woman’s 
desire to change her shape—and, incidentally, her 
soul—is the basis for this endless procession of the 


Woman: Her Dress 


35 


fashions; but the whole matter is due to the cunning 
use the purveyors of women’s attire make of this 
instinct. The quick changes of fashion are fixed up 
by the designers and manufacturers of women’s 
clothes. They have the stuff to sell and they naturally 
want the demand to be brisk. Hence they decree a 
new fashion whenever they feel bored. Same as the 
motor-car manufacturers. 

Women are ashamed of their sameness to each 
other. The sex’s whole idea is to attain an individ¬ 
uality by the only means in its power—the variety 
in dress. When a woman meets every other woman 
wearing the same sort of dress and displaying the 
same outward shape it is time for her to be different. 
The makers of fashions provide her with the means. 
Each succeeding fashion is as complete a contrast 
with the preceding fashion as the designers can make 
it. If hips are in, next week hips are out. The 
waist that was as high as it could go descends as low 
as the legs will let it. The front that was curvy 
becomes the front that is straight. The skirt that 
flowed to the ankles is lifted to the calf. The skirt 
that was wide becomes the skirt that is a sheath or a 
barrel. The hat that was small becomes the hat that 
flops. And vice-versa in another three months. 

But the old fashions, like the bustle and the leg-of- 
mutton sleeve and the crinoline, despite all the efforts 
of the modistes, will never return. For the modern 


36 Guide Book to Women 

woman insists on displaying all the figure she pos¬ 
sesses. And the dress designers know it. All fash¬ 
ions henceforth will insist on showing all that there is 
of a woman beneath, with as many actual glimpses of 
the woman inside as are possible. The bare back is 
only a beginning of the ebbing of the tide of dress. 
There are connoisseurs who wonder why women 
started by exposing their backs. After all, say these 
wise men, a woman’s back is not in itself wildly in¬ 
teresting. 

Do women dress to cover their nakedness ? At this 
question even a woman will smile. The basic idea 
is to cover up just as much of a woman as will suggest 
that there are other portions still covered. 

“Absurd!” snorts the nice woman. “I never dress 
suggestively.” 

No, madam; but all the designers depend on their 
living for the lure they can give to a woman’s figure. 
They are setting the fashions for you; and what they 
decide upon as smart, and what you like because of 
its smartness, are the cut and the line that the fashion- 
mongers have cunningly discovered for their ever- 
varying appeal to the masculine eye. 

But women do not dress for men? The philos¬ 
opher will reply that women undress for men. 


.Woman: Her Dress 


37 


WHAT MEN KNOW OF DEESS 

Of course a man is not a critic of a woman’s dress. 
He doesn’t know anything about its details. All that 
the man knows is that you look even more attractive 
in that new thing than you did the other day in that 
grey affair with furs. He vaguely feels that in the 
blue get-up—or it may he green—he is not much on 
colours— there’s a something that “gets” hiip. Quite. 
He sees you in the mass, not in detail. He doesn’t 
understand why that roll collar on your blouse makes 
your neck look inviting. All he knows is that you 
look just “it” and he thanks the gods for it. He 
doesn’t see your new dress: he merely sees a new and 
unexpected you. 

But if his wife asks him to tell her what your new 
gown was like, as she would be bound to do, all he 
could say was that you looked very smart and fetch¬ 
ing. And the next thing you knew would be the dis¬ 
covery by your wife that she simply hadn’t a single 
thing to wear. 

Yet in the main man’s judgment of a woman’s 
frock is right. Man may not know about the details, 
but he knows about the effect. And he notices that 
the majority of women, no matter how smartly 
gowned they are, do not get the right effect. As 
women are never quite sure about themselves they 


38 Guide Book to Women 

leave tlie choice of a gown to the dressmaker, who is 
supposed to know. 

With all the anxious interest a woman takes in her 
appearance, she does not study her figure and facial 
idiosyncrasies, or defects, with the sesthetic interest 
that she should. Her mirror shows her what she 
wants to see of herself. She does not choose her dress 
to suit herself. She sees something that looks per¬ 
fectly sweet on a marionette or in a fashion book. 
The marionette is chosen for her willowy graceful¬ 
ness and her superb figure. 

So a woman does not consider her frock in relation 
to her figure or lack of figure. She does not choose 
the right hat for her delicious nose, or the right blouse 
for her graceful neck, or the right skirt for her juno- 
esque hips. She does not consider the wideness of her 
shoulders or the thickness of her ankles. 

THE WELL-GROOMED WOMAN's HUSBAND 

The fact is that the really well-dressed woman has 
usually an artistic husband. For when men, who 
have no chance to design their own clothes, since all 
men wear uniform, let loose their artistic interests 
in dress, they turn out their wives in a way that is 
the envy of all their wives’ friends. There is many 
a mute inglorious Milton of dress-designing to be 
found in the suppressed husband of a well-groomed 


Woman: Her Dress 


39 


woman. He it was who chose those wonderful frocks 
for her—and paid for them. Most of us just pay for 
them—and what husband in drawing his cheque for 
the milliner feels that he is getting his money’s 
worth ? The wise wife, who trusts her husband’s aes¬ 
thetic sense, has enough sense to do what she is told 
and wear what he—and not she—wants. But when 
a wife fearfully and anxiously dolls herself up in 
her new dress and turns her back so that he can see 
the hang of the skirt and the flat hip effect, concealing 
all the time her awful suspicion that it makes her 
look fat, and asks him a tremulous, “Well, don’t you 
like it?” he merely looks at her face and remarks, 
“You look all right in it, old girl. What’s wrong 
with it ?” 

But it is a curious thing that when a man goes in 
for dress design he easily beats the best efforts of the 
women dress-designers. He has a sense of line and 
contour—and there is quite a lot of contour in a 
woman’s figure. He has a sense of colour harmony 
and colour contrast that is infinitely more delicate 
than that of women. The great dress-designers of the 
world have always been men—those crude, coarse 
brutes. And in the modern smart world the man 
dress-artist occupies a position as supreme as does the 
male pictorial artist. Man creates the model that 
madam so smartly wears. 

Women dress for women, especially for that cat, 


40 Guide Book to Women 

your dearest friend. The details of cut and decora¬ 
tion are for women’s eyes. The modern drama of 
dress is produced for the critics—and the fact that 
so many wrongly-dressed women get away with it 
is that the critics are, fortunately for the wearers, 
rottenly poor critics. There are hats going about the 
world that would he hissed off any stage if the critics 
were men. 


FASHION’S TKAGEDY—FAT 

The eternal tragedy of woman is that fashion is 
designed only for the slim. And fat women have to 
wear it. 

The amazing thing to men is that women, whose 
closest preoccupation all their lives is to study dress, 
make such awful mistakes. We allow women to dress 
as they like, or as they think they must. Women 
despite her knowledge of prices and her instinct for 
colour, is not aesthetic. She hasn’t taste in dress. 
She wears hats that make a man wonder whether they 
were designed by lunatics for lunatics. Yet these 
lunatics know their market. They know that the 
most horrible hat or the most disastrous combination 
of colours on a costume will find a purchaser. Some 
woman will come in some day and want just that hat 
and just that dress. ~No doubt, men if they were al¬ 
lowed their own way, would commit just such sartorial 


Woman: Her Dress 


41 

crimes; but luckily, they have to put on what is 
practically a uniform. 

Even in the details of dress the majority of women 
go hopelessly wrong. The stout woman wears hori¬ 
zontal stripes instead of perpendicular ones. The fat 
woman will appear in white instead of black. The 
thin woman will accentuate her skinniness by dis¬ 
guising even the remnants of a figure she has got. 
The flamboyant woman will riot in colours. The short 
woman will wear a low waist. The tall woman will 
wear hers high. The fat woman will emphasize her 
fatness by furs or beribboned fluffiness. The woman 
with ugly hands will persist in wearing rings, which 
call attention to the ugliness of her knuckles and the 
boniness of her joints. 

Ho woman has ever been known to give unqualified 
praise to her bosom friend’s new frock. She will com¬ 
mend parts of it enthusiastically, and when going she 
will remark, “But don’t you think that . . .” Or, “If 
I were you, I’d . . .” Or, “But my dear, it seems 
to make you look (shorter, fatter, older, skinnier, 
more married ... or something—just the thing, 
picked out by her with an uncanny precision, that 
she knows would hurt you). And perhaps just the 
thing you secretly fear for yoursef. 

That is all the compensation you can get out of 
your bosom friend’s luck in getting a new frock. But 
it helps. 


42 Guide Book to Women 

Women are built that way. In their hearts they 
are envious of even their husband’s new suit. If your 
husband can afford to pay that many guineas for a 
new suit, isn’t it quite time that you had a new frock 
for yourself ? 

Yet no woman would any more think of choosing 
a dress by herself than she would allow her husband 
to decide on the material for his new suit. She is at 
heart profoundly doubtful of her knowledge of dress, 
She has to take her dearest friend to help her to 
choose it; and her dearest friend is delighted—almost 
as delighted as if she was choosing one for herself. 
And not only will she devote an afternoon to selecting 
the gown, but she will volunteer to see her friend 
being tried on. And being tried on is not a pleasure; 
it is like having a tooth drawn for two and a half 
hours. Yet both the victim and her friend will go 
through this agony for the sake of a new frock—for 
only one of them. Seeing another woman being fitted 
is more exciting than a picture show. 

PUT THEM INTO UNIFORM 

In their own interests women should all be put into 
uniform. Man prefers his uniform of modern attire; 
he hates to make himself conspicuous, unless he hap¬ 
pens to be a bookmaker. Women themselves admit 
that they look smart in uniform. But they would hate 
to have to sink their individuality in a feminine uni- 


Woman: Her Dress 


43 


form. It gives away the fact that all women are 
fatally alike. Woman is the normal sex. Man is the 
variegated sex. Woman keeps closer to the feminine 
pattern than man does to the male. The male tends 
to “sports.” He has to develop away from the aver¬ 
age, to develop his brain or his muscle or his money¬ 
making faculty in order to exist. Woman, in order 
to fulfil her job, has to keep as closely to the normal 
standard as she can. 

A man can be a freak, and get away with it, espe¬ 
cially if he is a money-making freak. 1STo woman 
wants to be a freak, and she couldn’t be a married one 
if she wanted to. Woman’s ideal is curves and soft¬ 
ness; man reaches out into angularities and hard¬ 
nesses. Man is fundamentally a cubist; woman is a 
curvist. 

Woman’s infinite variety is merely the variety of 
her frocking. Put her into uniform and she remains % 
uniform. The only uniform she wears is the one she 
dons when she goes to bed. And then it doesn’t 
matter. 

Finally, it may be said that dress is woman’s sec¬ 
ond-best excitement. The thought of a new dress is 
a greater stimulant to her than even a cup of tea. 
A new hat will in itself take the sting out of what 
your dearest friend said when she saw you in it. 

And does not every widow know that she found 
a solace for her grief in choosing her mourning? 


CHAPTER III 


WOMAN: HER WORK 

N OW, this is a dull subject. 

If this ,was an ideal world woman’s work 
should consist of merely existing beautifully. Her sole 
function should be to brighten this globe with her 
loveliness, to set the world jazzing with the delight 
of her presence and her passing, to give to our hum¬ 
drum existence the aroma and the allurement of sex, 
and generally to hold men on the tenterhooks of won¬ 
der, to keep them guessing, to tantalize and to tease 
them, to spur them on or hold them back, to thrill 
them and to worry them, to scorn them and to pet 
them, and generally to shake things up. 

But not to inspire men. 

It is a painful fact that no woman ever inspired a 
man to the extent of twopence worth of genius. A 
poet or greengrocer gets his inspiration from him¬ 
self ; not from a female. Inspiration is a purely mas¬ 
culine perquisite. Ho female need apply. His in¬ 
spiration apparatus works far out of reach of her 
influence. Married poets do not write poems to their 
44 


Woman: Her Work 45 

wives. They kiss them. And that is much more sat¬ 
isfactory to both. 

The wise wife of the artist or pawnbroker does 
not hang round the husband when he is in the throes 
of painting or pawnbroking; she sees that he gets 
a good hot meal three times a day. What he wants is 
cutlets, not kisses. 

And that is why the wife of a genius is always 
jealous of his masterpieces. She knows in her soul 
that she has had nothing to do with the production 
of these dear children of his mind. 

Woman’s function in this scheme of things is to 
act as the piece of grit in the smooth running wheels 
of life. Her job is to jab hatpins into the other half 
of humanity, just to see what happens. She is the 
pretty fly in the ointment of life; she is the golden 
hair in humanity’s soup. 

WOMAN]—THE BOLSHEVIK 

Her business is to shake things up, to get into 
work’s way, to be the eternal red-haired and red- 
blooded rebel. She is the angel which steps in where 
male fools fear to tread. She is the irresponsible 
spender and squanderer of man’s money, the untamed 
pet that he keeps on the premises, the handy thing that 
he has in the house. She is the odd-shaped bit of the 
puzzle of life that never seems to fit into its place. 
She is the loose end of civilization, shedding hairpins 


'46 Guide Book to Women 

down the path of history. She is civilization’s one 
spoilt child; and when she is civilized life won’t be 
worth living. So we go on spoiling her. 

She is also Common-Sense. Man wants to go out 
hunting, inventing things, fighting other men, creat¬ 
ing poems and pictures and butcher shops and stock 
exchanges; and woman reminds him that he is better 
at home looking after her. The only thing woman 
has ever invented is marriage; that is good enough 
for her. And it will last considerably longer and 
needs less improvements than most of men’s inven¬ 
tions. 

Woman says, “Don’t bother about looking at sun¬ 
sets or rainbows. Look at me!” And man does, and 
likes it. 

Woman is the eternal Bolshevik, the silken, sleek, 
untameable tiger roaming through the jungles of civ¬ 
ilization, waving her sinuous tail invitingly in the 
air and purring sweetly, “Chase me!” And we do— 
and it gives us an appetite. 

Woman was created to stir, upset, stimulate, 
worry, delight, annoy, astonish, hurt, degrade, uplift, 
and keep us guessing. 

She is our ideal, our dream, our delight. She dwells 
in a dim and delighted region where logic doesn’t 
count and where lip-salve does. She is the disturber 
of the world’s peace, and we can’t do without her. 


Woman: Her Work 47 

And, as regards her own sex, she is the unblushing 
blackleg. 


DOES THE DIRTY WORK 

And this delightful and adorable spoilt child that 
we clothe and board and lodge for the whole of her 
life, either as father or husband, does all the dirty 
work of the world. 

It is to woman that all the disagreeable tasks in 
life fall. She has to do all the cooking and the mend¬ 
ing and the cleaning and the tidying up for mankind. 
This ethereal apparition of loveliness and allure 
knows all about cooked and uncooked meat. She has 
to. She does all of the unskilled labour of the world. 
She has to learn the prices of vegetables and estimate 
the toughness of steak. She has to do the dreary 
work of cooking and suffer the deadly agonies of 
washing up. 

And it is work that has no eight-hour limit. And 
it is not exciting or even interesting work. It is 
intermittent and never ending. She can never, like 
her husband, shut down the roll-top desk and know 
that the job is finished. Ho woman’s job is ever 
finished. Every room is always waiting to be tidied 
up, and the minute it is tidied up it begins to 
get untidy again. And the next day the whole dreary 
routine has to be gone through again—with the same 
inconclusive result. Woman has to sweep and dust 


48 Guide Book to Women 

and clean up, day by day, or see that somebody else, 
of her sex and usually unskilled, has to sweep and 
dust and clean up. 

It may be said that woman gets the dirty work 
of the world because that is all, as a labour-saving 
device, she is fitted for. Scientists cruelly tell her 
that she is the coarser sex, that her dainty finger¬ 
tips are not as sensitive as men’s, that all delicate 
work, calling for an extreme sense of touch or ex¬ 
quisite dexterity, is done by men. 

Watch any woman—even the woman you love— 
sharpen a pencil. The mess a mere slip of a girl can 
make of a man’s life is nothing to the mess a woman 
makes of a pencil point. !Nor can she tie a knot. 
Instead of tying a simple knot that will stay tied, she 
ties a dozen inefficient knots in the hope that there 
is safety in numbers. The only knot she understands 
and studies is the marriage knot—and even that 
often comes untied. 

Woman in this mechanical age remains profoundly 
disdainful and ignorant of machinery. Every small 
boy takes his toys to pieces to see how they work. 
Every man takes the world, or his business, or his 
lawn-mower or his motor-car, or his mind, to pieces 
to see how it works. But what woman ever has the 
interest in her sewing machine to see why it goes—or 
doesn’t go. 

“And where,” says patient Griselda, “would I get 


Woman: Her Work 


49 

the time?” And anyhow, what’s a husband for if 
not to mend the sewing machine? 

The most important difference between civilization 
and savagery is that civilization has pockets and 
savagery has none. Man has to carry about the con¬ 
veniences of civilization; he has to have these extra 
hands and nails and claws and eyes and teeth handy, 
ready to be used whenever he wants them. Hence 
he must abound in pockets. The modern man has 
at least a dozen pockets in his suit; he carries around 
with him a pencil, a fountain pen, a pocket-book or 
purse, a knife, a hankerchief, a corkscrew, a pipe, 
tobacco, keys, matches, bills, cash, stamps, love- 
letters, a card case, and a cigarette case. These are 
merely the essentials; he usually has extras like 
glasses or false teeth. But woman manages to do 
without. Her only pocket she carries in her hand, 
thus rendering herself unable to use both arms; and 
her hand-bag, not being part of her dress, is liable to 
be lost or stolen. 

Certainly she carries her tools of trade in that one 
pocket, her hand-bag. There will be found the most 
useful instrument in her armoury, the tiny mirror. 
The rest of its contents don’t really matter, with the 
exception of her dry-cleaning apparatus. 

But it is important to note that modern woman 
faces the world with none of the weapons and con¬ 
veniences that civilization has provided for man. 


50 


Guide Book to Women 


She goes valiantly through life armed only with a 
lipsol stick and a powder puff. 

And as a tribute to woman’s ingenuity and re¬ 
source, what a lot she can do with these trivial 
weapons! 

IF MEN HAD THE BABIES! 

Man relegates woman to the worst work; and 
Nature joins in the conspiracy. Having a baby is 
a nine months’ job—and a very wearying and un¬ 
pleasant job, with a terror, worse than having a 
tooth out, waiting for the woman at the end. And 
she has nine months in which to contemplate that 
terror. 

Husbands regard the matter with equanimity. 
They can; but suppose it was the proud privilege 
of the male sex to bring the babies into the world! 

“It would do them good!” every mother in the 
world would sigh. 

It would. What man would contemplate with¬ 
out qualms a contract out of which he couldn’t get, 
and into which, perhaps, he was persuaded or forced 
against his will ? Consider that contract. One of 
its conditions would he that he must be off colour 
and miserable and ill during a considerable portion 
of the time; yet he would have to dust the office and 
tidy up the floor and be cheerful to his business 
friends and refrain from having moods, or suddenly 


Woman: Her Work 


51 


weeping in the arms of his banker or the office boy, 
and be considerate to his poor wife when he returned 
to her, and put on a brave face just to keep her from 
worrying about him, and pretend that he had an 
appetite just to please her. 

(And all the time, in the nights when he couldn’t 
sleep, he would wake and shudder at what was go¬ 
ing to happen to him before he was freed from the 
contract. But he wouldn’t wake his wife calmly 
slumbering at his side. Poor girl, she wanted her 
sleep!) 

And then he would have to see his figure, on which 
as a single man he had rather prided himself—it was 
so straight and slim—gradually become otherwise. 

He would have to advertise to all his friends at 
the club and to all the staff at his office or his factory 
the fact that he was going to have a baby. He would 
have to listen to all the clever remarks his male 
friends had to make on the subject, and to find him¬ 
self the object of all their bets about the baby’s sex. 
And he would perhaps overhear calculations made 
by his business friends concerning the date of his 
marriage. 

His temper would get short and he would neglect 
his work, and everybody would know the reason. 
And towards the close of that awful nine months’ 
contract, during which he would have had to give 
up his golf or his bowls, and be very careful about 


52 Guide Book to Women 

jumping off the tram, he would have to give up his 
work altogether. He would mope about the house 
and take stealthy and clumsy walks at night—with 
the knowledge that all his male neighbours were peep¬ 
ing out of their windows at him, and wondering .... 

And always at the back of his weary mind would 
lurk the fear that perhaps the doctor or the nurse 
wouldn’t get there in time. Or that he might never 
come out of it alive—or the more awful possibility 
that it might be twins. 

And he would never know to a day, or perhaps a 
fortnight, when the contract would be ended. 

But when the baby was born the man’s troubles 
would just be beginning. He would have to feed 
and care for the child. He would have to change it 
and clean up after it, and worry about its appetite 
and other things and dose it and bathe it and wake up 
with it and walk the floor all night. 

And this would tie him down, anchor and isolate 
him, for at least a year. 

Everything else in the world, the purchase of a 
new suit, the game of bridge, the dinner in town 
with his male friends, the afternoon at golf, the 
flirtation with his pretty typewriting clerk, the day 
at the races—everything would be at the beck and 
call of a tyrannical autocrat in ita little cot at 
home. 

And when he got moody his wife would consider 


Woman: Her Work 


53 


that he was doing it on purpose and call it plain 
temper, and tell him that if she couldn’t get peace 
and quietness in her home she would put on her hat 
and go and dine with her female friends in town. 
She would say that, goodness knew, it was expensive 
enough for her to have the baby without her husband 
getting fretful and failing to love her as he used to. 
And then she would slam the front door. 

And the father would flop down and weep. But 
the poor chap wouldn’t be allowed to weep long, for 
the dinner or the baby or the maid would insist on 
him getting up and putting things right. 

And though his repentant wife might bring him 
home a nice box of cigars to make amends for her 
harshness, and pet him and apologize, what chance 
would he have of smoking a cigar when the baby 
was restless or hungry ? 

If men had to bear children the population statis¬ 
tics would drop to nothing in one year. If men had 
to change them and care for them they would drown 
the whole litter. 

The man has not yet been bom who can hold a 
baby longer than ten minutes. Holding a baby 
exhausts the strongest athlete. So women have to 
do it. 

There is a further toll that Nature takes of the 
mother. Nature changes a girl’s figure into that 
of a matron; and though a matron’s figure may be 


54 Guide Book to Women 

more beautiful than that of a maiden, the male sees 
more beauty in the bride than in the young mother. 

But though the man is cruel in this he is not 
cruel to the wife who is expecting her baby. It is 
an undoubted fact that no husband notices the 
gradual change in his wife’s figure: he simply does 
not see it. This is a matter of abiding wonder and 
thankfulness among wives. 


ACQUIRING A HUSBAND 

Woman’s most important work in life, with the 
exception of washing up, is to acquire a husband. 
That is what she came into the world for. This 
capture of a husband is often a matter of luck, though 
it is always achieved by the deep machinations of 
Mother Nature. It is woman’s duty so to do, and 
she does it. 

For the acquiring of a husband woman is specially 
designed. She is abundantly equipped with all the 
necessary weapons and means. She is given, not 
beauty, but the appearance of beauty—in men’s 
eyes. She unconsciously parades before men’s eyes 
the lure of sex. She is, for a brief flowering, the 
blossom that must be picked. Her figure, her fea¬ 
tures, her eyes, her gestures, her walk, her varied 
moods—all these are her terrible weapons. 

But Nature knows that even these appeals might 


Woman: Her Work 


55 


fail, so Nature provides the girl with more cunning 
weapons. She dowers the girl with deceit and an 
infinite cunning. In any other animal it would be 
termed a low cunning; but this attribute is there 
at Nature’s imperious desire. Woman’s wits win 
women the game. And the wits are sharpened by 
deceit and intrigue. Woman does not play fair, 
because Nature has given man the attribute of brute 
strength. Nature matches that crude strength with 
a woman’s sharp cunning. The girl deceives, pre¬ 
tends, lies, in self-defence. Nature insists on it; 
for Nature wants her mated. 

It is not suggested that every woman wins her man 
by deceit; but she adds to her attractiveness and her 
charm by deceiving the clumsy man. She makes a 
mystery of herself, she withdraws within herself, 
she refuses to disclose herself. And naturally the 
man wants her all the more. It is all part of Nature’s 
plan. 

And once the two are married what husband 
blames what wife? The double bed of matrimony 
is not always a bed of roses, but it is a bed of frank¬ 
ness. 


YOUR SOUL-MATE 

There is a theory, much prevalent during the early 
days of love, and lasting usually through the honey¬ 
moon, that there is only one soul-mate for every 


56 Guide Book to Women 

man and every woman in the world, and that by in¬ 
credible luck you and she have picked each other 
out from all the world of women and men. Later 
on you, or your wife, may have your doubts. 

The comfortable fact is that the course of true love 
leads straight to the nearest woman. Marriages are 
not made in heaven; they are made haphazard. 
Your soul-mate may he patiently waiting for you 
at the other side of the world, or he may not have 
been horn yet, or died a hundred years ago. But 
if you don’t meet him, you take somebody else, some¬ 
body handy. After all, all men are made in the 
same mould. And in time one married man grows 
indistinguishable from another married man. And 
whomever you take, you instantly endow him with 
all the attributes of your soul-mate; for woman’s 
capacity of deceit extends to herself. But the man 
does just the same to you. 

It is woman’s divine adaptability that smooths 
things over. In time, all wives are the same wife. 
They have to he. 

A dozen assorted men would suit any woman for 
a husband—though possibly not all the whole dozen 
at once. After all, the duties of a husband are not 
exacting. All he has to do is to provide her with a 
home and a few babies—the fewer the better, nowa¬ 
days—and the money to spend on her new Paris 
model. He must also kiss her occasionally, just 


Woman: Her Work 


57 


to remind her that he is there, and he must take her 
to the theatres and the races, and pretend to listen 
while she talks. 

There is, as you will admit, little soul-mateship 
about all these duties. Any ordinary citizen can, 
with a little practice, become an efficient and useful 
husband. And every wife will see that he gets all 
the practice necessary. It is therefore obvious that 
there are heaps of possible soul-mates wandering 
about disguised as bachelors who need only be taken 
in hand by women to become satisfactory husbands. 

If a woman marries a poet she becomes interested 
in poetry—even in his poetry; if she weds a grocer 
she grows enthusiastic about the grocery trade. If 
Tate gives her a man of heroic mould she admires 
his muscle; if her husband is a weed, she takes an 
interest in gardening. Her soul will fit any size of 
marriage. 

When discussing husbands—one of the few remain* 
ing solaces for married women—she upholds her par¬ 
ticular husband’s virtues and vices as the ideal endow¬ 
ment of all possible husbands. Her soul echoes his, 
just as the size of her home and the cost of her clothes 
depends upon the size of his income. 

So if instead of taking Egbert you had selected any 
of the other left-over eleven matrimonial possibilities, 
you would, in a few years’ time, not have discovered 
any difference in your life. You will get along just 


58 Guide Book to Women 

as happily and as comfortably and as monotonously 
with any one of the dozen probable starters. 

So when a wife’s soul-mate dies, the widow tries 
again. She has been perfectly happy with type No. 
1 of husbands. Naturally she wants another hus¬ 
band. But does she seek out another husband of 
the type she has already sampled ? No! She swings 
off the perfect husband for a type his exact opposite. 
She needs a change even from perfect happiness. 
For she knows in her heart that there are many 
types of perfect happiness, and that she can adapt 
herself to them all in turn. There are heaps of 
possible soul-mates in the world for any one woman, 
even for you. The trouble is that so few women 
ever get the chance to sample the rest of them. 

WIFE AND MISTRESS 

The modern wife has an engrossing job. She has 
to be wife, companion, mother, housewife and mis¬ 
tress. She has to uphold her husband’s status before 
the world. She has to manage his house and feed the 
brute. She has to bear and bring up his children. 
She has to take an intelligent interest in his business 
concerns. She has to advise him, and tell him when 
to get his hair cut. And, on top of these diverse 
jobs, she has to be physically attractive to him—in 
a word, to be his mistress, though married. 


Woman: Her Work 


59 


The secret of all happy marriages lies in the ability 
of a wife to approximate to this varied cast of char¬ 
acters. In married life a wife plays many parts, and 
she has to play all of them equally well. 

The average woman, once married, settles down 
into matrimony with a comfortable sigh of relief. 
She does her duty to her husband, his house and his 
family. She displays no interest in his business, 
the profits of which she spends. She may offer advice 
when she thinks he needs, and can afford, a new 
suit. She may dutifully call on her sisters-in-law, 
and sit at the feet of her mother-in-law, and ask 
all his relations down to dinner at intervals of three 
months. She may also do her duty to the race, in 
moderation. 

A woman who has had one child is no heroine. 
A woman who has had two children, one of each 
kind that is made, is still no martyr. Even a woman 
who has had two or three children all of the one 
sex is to be pitied rather than applauded. She is 
persistent, that is all. But when a woman has two 
children, judiciously spaced, a boy and a girl, and 
decides to have a third, she deserves the meritorious 
service medal. 

That at least is the modern wife’s creed. She 
explains that there is no heroism in bearing the first 
child, because before its appearance she doesn’t know 
what is ahead of her. And when she has got a 


6 o Guide Book to Women 


pigeon pair, she has no further inducement to go on. 

But in addition to all these varied duties thrust 
upon the modern wife, she must be a little harem 
all on her own. 

RECIPE FOR THE PERFECT MARRIAGE 

Some medieval philosopher once wrote down in 
black letter a recipe for a perfect marriage. It was, 
he stated, the only really happy marriage that had 
come under his notice. 

The doting husband made it a practice to reside 
for six months of the year in the jungles of Africa, 
with no poste restante address, his wife meantime 
living at home. Without informing his adored of 
the date of his return he would take passage for his 
homeland. On the night of his arrival, which he 
kept secret, he would make his way to the home of 
his wife. Naturally he would find the house locked 
up. He would also find the residence barricaded 
with barbed wire. But possibly from the window 
of his wife a dim light would be shining. But his 
wife’s bedroom was on the upper floor, and there 
were all those barbed wires to negotiate. 

Was that husband discouraged? Did he knock 
loudly on the door? Did he serenade her from the 
midnight street ? 

No, he forced his way through the wire. Then he 
found an old ladder, or climbed perilously up the 


Woman: Her Work 


61 


water pipe, or adventured on neighbouring roofs, 
until he reached the gleaming window. Then he 
smashed his way in; and as his wife started in affright 
from her bed, he remarked, “Hullo, wifey, I’m 
home!” 

The next morning he set forth again for the jungles 
of Africa, a happily married man. And there he 
stayed for another six months. 

But, on one of his widely separated honeymoons, 
an accident happened. The accident was another 
man. 

But this is an imperfect world. 

To return. 

THE HURRICANE HONEYMOON 

The worst part of marriage is the honeymoon. 
This period is popularly supposed, by those who 
haven’t tried it, to be composed of equal parts of 
romance, moonlight, hotels, kisses, confessions, trains, 
packing, and passion, judiciously mixed and served 
hot. 

Really, it is the most trying time for both parties. 
Consider its essence. You start off in a hurry to 
travel somewhere with a companion whom you 
don’t know at all, except as a person to be con¬ 
tinuously kissed. Under the trying conditions of 
life in steamers or trains and hotels you have to 


62 Guide Book to Women 


get to know somebody who doesn’t know you except 
as an heroic being eager to spend money on you 
and to pay you compliments. 

Your temperaments have to accommodate them¬ 
selves to each other; your personalities have to fuse 
into oneness; you have to settle which of the partners 
is to be the managing partner in a contract for life. 
And all this in one frenzied emotional fortnight. 
You have to lay the foundations of a happy marriage 
before you know that your bride uses curl-pins for 
her hair each night, and she has to reconstruct all 
her ideals of you when she learns that you take out 
your teeth for the night. 

And this mutual adjustment must be made in 
the intervals of rapturous embraces, and in the 
cynical eye of callous observers. The result is quar¬ 
rels, tempers, tears, adjectives. It has been calculated 
that more tears are shed by the bride during the 
honeymoon than during the rest of the first year of 
marriage. 

Neither can possibly understand the other during 
that hurried honeymoon; it takes years for any 
pair to adjust themselves to matrimony; it takes 
years to pardon and forget the first clashes of the 
misunderstanding bridegroom and the misunderstood 
bride. Often they settle down into a sullen and 
watchful resentment, until they learn the game of 
give-and-take that is necessary for this as all other 


Woman: Her Work 63 

contracts; and look back with a happy laugh at the 
childishness of their honeymoon. 

Marriage is the calm harbour into which the ship 
comes after the tempestuous crossing of the honey¬ 
moon bar. And it is worth while to adventure to 
that happy and peaceful haven. Marriage is the 
most pleasant species of dullness known on this globe. 


HURLED INTO MATERNITY 

Unfortunately your arrival into this calm is too 
often delayed by the complication of the baby. Be¬ 
fore the bride has had a chance to recover from the 
seasickness of her honeymoon she is hurled into 
maternity. And this is another unhappy incident on 
the matrimonial voyage. The bride becomes the 
expectant mother; and the husband who was just 
beginning to understand his wife finds that he has 
a new species of womanhood to deal with. 

He cannot understand why she has lost interest 
in him; he is annoyed at her erratic moods, at her 
unexpected and apparently causeless tears, at her 
physical sickness, at her fancies and her coldness. 

It is this mutual clash of jostling temperaments 
that is so often seen in the baby. The first baby 
is the product of two people who love each other but 
don’t really know each other. They haven’t had 
time. 


64 Guide Book to Women 

Give the bride her chance to know yon and make 
allowances for you. Give her a year to appreciate 
the wonders of marriage and the delight of being a 
young wife. Give her a holiday before she has to 
take up her life’s work. She will thank you, after¬ 
wards. She will have had something to look hack 
upon, the halcyon calm between the hurricane of 
the honeymoon and the heavy weather of child-birth. 

Then comes the autumn; but with too many 
couples that autumn comes too soon. It arrives in 
the middle of the spring. And this catastrophe is 
usually due to the wife’s inability to remain her 
husband’s mistress. 

Then the husband, finding his wife cold, and not 
knowing why she is cold, looks elsewhere for his 
mistress. For the wife’s love for her husband is 
only one of the many attributes she must possess. 
She gives to her child the affection she once gave to 
her husband, and rightly so. She has all the cares 
of the household, and her husband’s health, and the 
housekeeping, and the worries about the kiddies; 
and when her long day is done she is not in the mood 
to play the part of a married mistress. 


THE PERMANENT HONEYMOON 

Yet woman is so adaptable, and can be so many 
women in one that occasionally she is the whole 


Woman: Her Work 65 

cast of characters. But it is a heavy burden for one 
small woman to hear. 

But that is the happy marriage, the marriage that 
is one long honeymoon—and one that does not seem 
long. Some marriages last right through, for they 
have dissolved into a placid sediment of common¬ 
place in which all memories of passion have long 
been comfortably buried. The pair go calmly through 
life under the smooth-worn harness of matrimony. 
But the other marriage, the dangerous marriage, is 
a difficult affair to keep going right to the end. But 
when it succeeds it is worth while. 

Of course, it is difficult for a respectable wife to 
become her husband’s mistress. But quite necessary. 
For a wife has little opportunity of learning her 
trade as mistress, of becoming and remaining fas¬ 
cinating. Many wives don’t even know they should 
put scent on their lips. She knows only one man; 
but perhaps her husband can help. He may be able 
to give her hints. 

The wife who neglects catering for this side of 
her husband neglects her business, and may, one day, 
lose her job. For there are plenty of other women 
waiting around who will make up for her lack of 
knowledge and allure. 

It may appear, at first sight, to be a base and 
merely physical side of the business of being a wife. 
But happily-married mates are bound together as 


66 Guide Book to Women 


much as, or more than, by the physical aspect of their 
love as by its spiritual qualities, necessary as those 
must be. 

A husband is too apt to divorce his spiritual love 
from his physical love, and look for the latter else¬ 
where. And, if his wife only knew her business, he 
could get both at home, and save the taxi fares and 
the rent of that flat. No husband really wants to 
keep up two homes, when he can get all the comforts 
and the excitements of both under the one roof. 
Think of the saving in furs alone, when one set 
of furs would do for both wife and mistress! 

Woman’s work extends over three generations. 
She has to attend to each. She is the link that binds 
the generations together. During her lifetime she has 
to look after her husband, of the same generation 
as herself. She has also to look after her children, 
of the next generation. And she has to look after 
her mother, of the generation before her. And the 
modern grandmother takes more looking after than 
the other two generations. And, finally, she has to 
look after herself. But for that duty she doesn’t 
get much time. 


CHAPTEKiV 


WOMAN: HER TYPES 

T HE most common type of woman is the insigni¬ 
ficant type. This type forms the hulk of the 
community of women. It is also the most useful. 

She is just common, plain woman. She does the 
work of the world; she populates the world. She 
is the foil for all the beauty that woman brings into 
the world. She is the drab, neutral background 
against which that rare and evanescent loveliness of 
woman gleams. She makes the uncomplaining and 
humble workaday wife, the patient, worried and care¬ 
ful mother, the pleasant and insignificant grand¬ 
mother. Without her the world would not go on. 

She has a happy girlhood, making many girl¬ 
friends hut attracting few hoys. She looks naturally 
forward to flirtations and marriage. She gazes wist¬ 
fully into shop windows and wonders whether any 
of those gorgeous gowns will ever be worn by her. 
But she does her work in factory or shop or at home, 
or has her amusements, and doesn’t worry about her 
future. She is content with the common lot, and 
keeps her eye out for a likely husband. 

67 


68 Guide Book to Women 


THE TEPID MARRIAGE 

Then she finds a hoy—any hoy will do for her; 
but to her he is the only boy in all this world of 
males. 

For a brief space she blossoms; for a woman 
loved is always beautiful, not only in her lover’s eyes 
but in herself. Nature floods her face with rich 
blood and puts a sparkle of happiness into her eyes. 
And she sees her future husband through those 
sparkling eyes. She has not chosen any particular 
husband; she has fallen in with a husband—a male. 
But she is sure that he is the only husband in the 
world. Has he not chosen her ? 

They marry, and have a brief honeymoon; then, 
finding each other out, hut not blaming each other 
at all, they settle down to the tepid comfort of mar¬ 
riage. Then comes the baby; and the wife becomes 
the mother. The honeymoon of marriage is finished; 
her work begins again. Henceforth she is “Mum” 
and he is “Dad.” And that is all they are—or want 
to he. They are dully happy, satisfied with their 
lot, assured that this is all that there is in their lot. 

The children grow up, and the mother mends the 
boys’ pants and makes the girls’ frocks. And slowly 
she settles down into a placid motherhood. Gradually 
her interest in her husband fades; she grows ambiti¬ 
ous for her children. Passion, that save for a brief 
interval was never in her life, fades from her. The 


Woman: Her Types 69 

children marry; she becomes again a mother to her 
daughters’ children. And so she goes on until she 
placidly dies, ready for death and looking comfort¬ 
ably on a well-spent, but not particularly exciting, 
life. 

What was she lacking in? Intelligence, perhaps, 
ambition surely, certainly sex attraction. She was 
of the neutral sex, mating happily with a male neu¬ 
tral. And the world goes on. 

The feminine type of woman is more exciting. 
She is fully sexed, not fifty-fifty as is the neutral 
type. She hits on all cylinders. 

She is the type that when she is a child men can’t 
help noticing her. She is the girl in the row of school 
girls out for a walk who attracts the roving masculine 
eye—and doesn’t mind. She is the girl that has one 
flirtation after another, beginning when she is four¬ 
teen. She usually begins by falling violently in love 
with her schoolmistress. She collects and sheds boys 
all through her teens. She is an experienced and 
matured flirt. 

She can’t help herself. She is built that way. 
For sex is just as dominating in a female as in a male. 
Despite her calm, her ease and her expertness in 
flirtation, she has a heart. She may not let you see 
that heart, but it worries her just as much as man’s 
does him. The iciest maiden may melt at the most 
unexpected moment. But this moment usually hap- 


70 


Guide Book to Women 


AGAINST HEK WILL 

Here may be mentioned a fact of which girls are 
as a rule incredibly ignorant, and frankly and con¬ 
temptuously refuse to believe. Girls—let us be 
frank—are seduced. And most of them are seduced 
against their will. 

“Impossible!” you politely say. “Any girl can 
defend herself against no matter how brutal a man. 
She can scream, if necessary. No; she is not seduced 
against her will.” 

Yes, but sometimes she consents against her will. 

Take the case of a girl who wittingly or unwittingly 
gives a man who wants her the opportunity to take 
her by force. A girl can’t always tell a scoundred 
at sight. And a girl, knowing a man is in love with 
her, though she does not love him, takes incredible 
risks. She loves the power her beauty has over him. 
She delights in the thrill of being passionately adored. 
She tempts him, for the fun of the thing. Or un¬ 
wittingly, she can’t help tempting him—for women 
are temptations and dress themselves, all innocently, 
as temptations. 

One day—or night—she finds herself in a situa¬ 
tion from which there is no escape. 

Perhaps she tastes wine, and likes it. Perhaps 
she tastes music at a dance. The seduction of the 
modern dance music, with its pagan rhythms, may 


71 


Woman: Her Types 

culminate in the seduction of herself. Perhaps it is 
the spring, the moonlight—and the man. Perhaps 
she is rendered irresponsible by one of those mad 
moods, bred of loneliness or recklessness, that catch 
and compel a woman—moods that lie very deep in 
the subconsciousness of a woman’s mind. Moods 
that are more strenuously disciplined by men’s up¬ 
bringing than in women’s slacker lives. Moods that 
depend on woman’s body. 

She finds herself alone in some secluded spot with 
the man. A locked door—and she discovers herself 
without any defence but herself against the mad 
passion of a man, the man she has tempted too far. 

He kisses her. She struggles free. But the man 
is not to be fooled, as he thinks it, any more. She 
fights him; but forbears to scream. That is the 
key of woman’s morality. She must not be found 
out. To scream would bring the world. The world 
must never know. And the man banks on her not 
daring to scream. Better to suffer the worst, she 
distractedly thinks, as long as nobody knows. 

If women would only have the moral courage to 
scream! 

But she is confident that she can resist. The man, 
if he is scoundrel enough, is certain that she can’t. 
And the man too often wins. 

For, no matter how strenuously she fights him, 
he has the advantage of greater strength. And there 


72 


Guide Book to Women 


comes a time when the woman in her betrays her. 
Passionately determined that she will never give in, 
hating with a fierce hatred the thought of submit¬ 
ting, with all her moral strength of mind set firmly 
against this outrage, she is betrayed—by herself. 
The physical side of her surges up, overwhelming 
her scruples by its impetuous strength; and hef body 
consents, submits—nay, her body becomes passion¬ 
ately eager to submit, forces her not merely to accept 
his caresses but to return them. 

Woman is too sure of herself, too contemptuous 
of the physical side of herself, too ignorant of its 
strength and its overmastering desires, once those 
desires are thoroughly aroused. 

WOMAK/s RIVAL—WORK 

Woman, despite her surface calm, her inherent 
placidity, is much more dependent upon emotion 
in her life than man. Her rival is sometimes another 
woman; more often it is his work. For against the 
durable attractions of a man’s work a woman has 
little chance. Man finds in his work something that 
he would like to find in his love. Work is not only 
his occupation but his preoccupation. He can always 
depend on his work waiting for him and being ready 
for him; he knows that it is there when he wants 
it; he doesn’t need to flirt with it or flatter it, or 
to tell it it is looking younger every day; he doesn’t 


73 


Woman: Her Types 

have to take it to the theatre or the pictures; it 
doesn’t run up bills without him knowing anything 
about it until the new shoes or the smart gown is 
worn out; it never has moods and whims and caprices; 
and it never sulks. 

Many a wife has dimly suspected all her life that 
she had a rival somewhere—a rival who captured his 
thoughts when he ought to be thinking of her, a 
rival to whom he was more devoted than to her, 
a rival who never seemed to grow old. Naturally 
she imagined that her rival was someone in his office. 
But it wasn’t a she; it was an it. It wasn’t anyone 
in his office: it was his office itself. He had met and 
married his work long before he had met his wife. 
She was but an incident of romance; she was but a 
part—though a pleasant part—of his world; but 
work was his world, his steady-going and abiding 
romance. Marriage with a woman was, after all, 
only a brief honeymoon, a delightful vacation; but 
the comforting thought remained at the back of his 
head that he could always get back to work. Man’s 
ultimate and deep-seated craving is not for gaiety 
and romance, but a steady job. 

But if his wife became a steady job, he’d go on 
strike. 

A man is jealous, too, of that exacting mistress 
that requires such a life-long devotion. He won’t 
allow his woman to interfere with his work. 


74 


Guide Book to Women 


woman’s work 

Woman’s work is less absorbing, less regular, less 
exciting. It is haphazard, dull, monotonous, and 
never finished. How can we expect a woman to 
lose herself in it? She turns from the dull thing 
desperately to emotion. But there is really not 
enough romance and emotion for women in the world 
to go round. When it is all sorted out there is 
precious little emotion left for the average woman. 
She makes the most of it; but she has to look for 
it in the moving pictures and the novels. That is 
why there are movies and Ethel Dell. 

The last generation of women had to find its outlet 
for emotion in the novel; our mothers could only 
read about their hero. But nowadays a woman can 
see him on the screen. Our mothers imagined them¬ 
selves embraced by the pages of a novel; the modern 
girl is thrillingly kissed by a hero with a mouth (in 
the close-ups) half a yard long. It is so much more 
satisfying. 

And meanwhile the only romantic flesh and blood 
being that fate has allotted to her is busy at his 
office, stolidly and perseveringly happy with the per¬ 
manent and satisfactory life-romance of his daily 
work. Man is romantic and sentimental only in 
the intervals of his work. Woman isn’t in the least 
interested in the work he allots her; she wants a 


75 


Woman: Her Types 

perpetual honeymoon of romance, or rather a succes¬ 
sion of different honeymoons, with a new hero in 
the lead every time. Woman lives on emotion, and 
she is usually starved. 

SHE WANTS THAT KISS 

A full-sexed woman wants that kiss just as much 
as a man wants it. But she gives the man no informa¬ 
tion on the subject, not even a danger signal. But 
she has a deep contempt for the man who ought to 
have kissed her, and didn’t. But her contempt is 
not so deep as that of the man, when he recognizes 
the golden moment he had lost. 

He wanders eagerly around, looking for another 
chance. But the other chances never come the same 
way or from the same girl. 

For woman is by temperament and by instinct 
colder than the man. She is a late starter in the 
game of flirtation. Man is by temperament a self¬ 
starter. He gets early off the mark. All woman’s 
defences against the man warn her not to give her¬ 
self away. It spoils the game for her; she likes to 
delay and linger over the preliminaries. 

But once she feels that the game is afoot she makes 
up for her delay. Her kiss is as warm as the man’s. 
Her blood is as hot as his. She is a human being, 
with the same rare opportunities for emotion in her 


j6 Guide Book to Women 

life as there are in a man’s. And she needs emotion 
more. 

Woman doesn’t love. She loves being loved. 

She is all love, waiting to be awakened. She is 
the Sleeping Beauty that is resuscitated by Prince 
Charming’s kiss. Have you ever thought of the 
Sleeping Beauty’s incredible luck? The first man 
to force his way through the jungle of illusions that 
surrounded her heart she accepted. It might have 
been the president of the Baptists’ Union or the 
plumber. Ho; it would not have occurred to the 
Baptist President to kiss her, that the obvious and 
only way to revive was by a kiss. But no such doubts 
would affect a plumber—or any other married man. 
He would know. And by the mere kiss the Sleeping 
Beauty would know that the plumber was a prince. 

So many girls discover later on that the Prince 
Charming that had awakened her to love was only 
a plumber. But by that time she has married the 
plumber. This basic fact explains so many modern 
marriages—and divorces. 

Awakened by a kiss, the modern maid returns it. 
She loves being loved. She recognizes even in a 
man who wears whiskers the ideal of her soul. In 
her long delicious dreams of maidenhood she may 
have hoped for a king or a film hero to fill her heart; 
but when somebody in trousers awakens her she dis¬ 
cards the corsets of illusion and imprisons her adapt- 


77 


Woman: Her Types 

able figure in one of those straight-fronted things 
of matter-of-fact. The film hero would doubtless 
have been more exciting for a time, but the stock¬ 
broker is more solid and lasting. And so they live 
happily ever after. 

It is, after all, a mere matter of luck whether the 
full-sexed type remains a happily married wife or 
becomes a divorcee, whether she goes on the stage 
or goes to the bad, whether she contents a husband 
or rises on the stepping-stones of discarded lovers 
to marriage with a millionaire. Many a mute inglori¬ 
ous mother of five, if the opportunity had beckoned, 
might have been starred in the front page of 1 a con¬ 
tinent’s newspapers. 

THE SHY ONE 

Happily nowadays the shy type of woman is almost 
extinct. She has had a long innings; but she knows 
better now. In every family of the older generation 
there is always a maiden aunt. She seems to get 
along happily enough, mothering other people’s chil¬ 
dren, and putting up with the slights and disadvan¬ 
tages of living, almost on sufferance, in her mother’s 
or her married sisters’ homes. 

She was the shy one of the family. There is always 
the tale of the suitor she might have had, if she hadn’t 
been so shy. She was the modest blossom that sat 


78 Guide Book to Women 

back when the men arrived, and let her more selfish 
sisters snap them up. She was the self-sacrificing 
one, who was so fond of her mother. She simply 
couldn’t bear to leave the happy home. However 
would Mother have got along without her ? 

And Mother, being also selfish, had allowed her to 
pass her chances by, in order that she should con¬ 
tinue to look after her mother. 

She was the home-girl. She gave up her outings 
so that her sisters should have their good time. 
Somebody had to stay at home to look after the house. 
Meantime the selfish, and rightly selfish, sisters 
angled for their men, and annexed them. Why not ? 
That is the rule of life. That is why women came 
into the world. That is their job. 

So the sweet shy girl faded slowly into the maiden 
aunt. 

But the modem girl has no ambitions to become a 
maiden aunt. Self-sacrifice is an excellent thing, 
except for a girl. Her duty is to pick out of the 
world some nice man to make him happy, or unhappy, 
for the rest of their lives. 

Marriage for a man is often an incident. His 
work goes on just the same, except that he has to 
work harder and give up his golf, and his silk pyja¬ 
mas. But for a girl marriage is a career, practically 
the only career that is open to her. Nature has 
spent countless centuries on her education for that 


Woman: Her Types 79 

career. It is the only thing that woman does passably 
well. 

The most amazing fact to a man is that a nice 
girl should adore him. None of us men ever really 
get over our amazement. A man, looked at critically, 
is not a beautiful or even attractive object. The 
shy youth, when he makes the startling discovery 
that Gladys not only likes to sit on his bony knees, 
but is quite willing to be kissed good and hard, is 
firstly frankly incredulous, and thereafter tremen¬ 
dously bucked. He blossoms into new suits and wears 
startling ties. He imagines that he is something 
especially brilliant and notable. Else why should 
Gladys tolerate him at all? 

A man in bed is, let us say it in sad truth, an 
uncouth and ridiculous object. His boniness is 
utterly out of place among white sheets. A man in 
pyjamas is a pathetic and incongruous sight. He 
always feels slightly ashamed of himself. And a 
man knows it. Hence his saddening partiality for 
gaudy stripes in bed attire. He dumbly hopes that 
his ugliness will not be noticed beneath the broad 
pink stripes of his pyjamas. 

A woman in bed is always beautiful. She doesn’t 
really need the lace and the openwork that she de¬ 
lights in. She cuddles up in the white sheets as 
part of the bed-room picture. She is rounded and 


8 o Guide Book to Women 


soft and not lacking in curves. Man, compared with 
her, is a problem in Euclid. 

THE VAMP 

The vampire woman, who has been having such 
a sensational run in the moving pictures lately, does 
not exist—except on the celluloid. Woman does not 
want to vamp, and even if she has inclinations that 
way, she doesn’t know her job. Her immemorial 
job is to ruin a man, but not by drink or other devil¬ 
tries. She ruins him by marriage. It is a much more 
satisfying and a much more complete method of 
ruining a man. And it pays much better than the 
film way of the vamp. 

Every woman is at heart a vamp, a predatory but 
a respectable vamp. There aren’t enough mar¬ 
riageable men in the world: why spoil them when 
they can be made use of ? A girl fixes her innocent, 
adoring eyes upon some free and irresponsible young 
man, who always has money to spend, and delights 
to spend it on her—in return for the opportunity 
to kiss her. Before he is aware the wedding-day 
is announced. 

Then his ruin begins. It is such a gradual and 
such an exciting way of being ruined that he goes to 
his tragedy with his eyes shut. He hardly notices 
that the money he had to spend he now has to spend 
on two instead of on one. And soon there are three 


Woman: Her Types 81 

to spend his money upon. So his worries are trebled; 
he has to worry over his wife, too, now, and often 
worry so much that he has no time to worry over 
his own troubles. And each kiddie that comes along 
is an additional worry. 

Instead of being a care-free human being, lord of 
himself and captain of his independent soul, he sinks 
into the married man, the dulled father. The wife 
vamp has got him in her toils. He no longer buys 
hats for himself; he buys hats for her. He gives 
up his golf; he resigns from his club; he pushes the 
perambulator; he mows the lawn; and puts off get¬ 
ting that new suit until his old one betrays him. His 
end comes when his friends speak of him as a thor¬ 
oughly domesticated man. Of course, having reached 
that stage he ought to commit suicide; but he has by 
this time long lost the capacity to kill himself—and 
besides, if he did, what would become of the wife 
and the family? So there is nothing left for him 
but to drag on on the straight dull track of domes¬ 
tication until death releases him and he goes hope¬ 
fully off to the place where there is no marrying and 
no giving in marriage. 

THE PSEIJDO-YAMP 

In the pictures we see the full-grown vamp, a 
thing of curvist art, all snaky silhouette and lissom, 
sinister loveliness, whose every movement suggests 


82 Guide Book to Women 


the possibilities and probabilities of passion, a lusci¬ 
ous human animal looking for her foredoomed prey. 
She cannot enter a restaurant without evoking 
shudders and thrills in the being of every waiter, 
and she works her large cow-like eyes overtime. She 
has merely to fasten those eyes on the noble hero 
to fascinate him; and for the hero it is all over. 

Then, having got him into her stranglehold she 
proceeds to ruin this man who, if left unvamped, 
might have become president of the United States. 
As for little tearful wifey, she hasn’t a chance against 
this predatory female. For in the pictures it is 
always the good and strong hero without a vice ex¬ 
cept golf who is ruined by the vamp. 

But in real, not reel, life the only victim a vamp 
devours is a man not worth devouring. He is never 
a strong man; he is usually a weakling, the good 
fellow whom everybody looks after because he needs 
looking after. Inevitably he is vamped, and if he 
goes phut the world puts it down to some baby vamp 
who has fastened on to him. She merely completes 
his education. He was his own victim long before 
he met his vamp. Some men were born to be vamped. 

Occasionally a vamp is the best thing that could 
have happened to him. For there is little fun in 
ruining a man; and there is no living in it even for 
the most pertinacious vamp. Many a weakling has 


Woman: Her Types 83 

been turned into a passable husband by wedding his 
baby vamp. 

The vampire in real life is a mere imitation of the 
film variety. She easily imitates the sinousness and 
the snakiness of the movies; but she hasn’t the quali¬ 
fications for the job. It takes a lot of practice to be¬ 
come a professional vamp; and by the time the baby 
vamp is grown up and expert she is married or too 
old for the work. The vamp stage in a girl’s life 
is a common one; she grows out of it when she meets 
the man she needs to look after her. She doesn’t 
spoil her market by making him bankrupt or a vic¬ 
tim to drink. 

Exit the vamp. 

The masculine woman doesn’t need any space. She 
is merely a man in the shape of a woman; and there’s 
not much fun in looking like a woman and being a 
man. 


THE ARTISTIC FEMALE 

The literary or artistic woman is the greatest bluff 
ever put up on the world that is always ready to be 
bluffed. Every girl goes through a literary or artis¬ 
tic or musical stage. It is part of her development, 
part of her reactions when blossoming into woman¬ 
hood. During this awkward phase of her growth 
she dives amazingly into the arts. She writes won- 


84 Guide Book to Women 

derful poetry or shows remarkable promise as an art 
student. 

But the world waits, knowing well that this is hut 
an efflorescence of sex that will merge into more 
practical results. The girl wakes up to the fact that 
she is a woman and not an artist. She has her real 
work in the world to do, to dress and make the most 
of her chief asset, her body, and to leave her brain 
alone. She may go on writing poems or painting 
pictures, hut gradually these decrease in importance 
as her real interests crowd them out of her real life. 
She falls in love, and all the poetry in her composi¬ 
tion is devoted to idealizing her usually common¬ 
place lover. She marries and produces no more 
poems; she produces babies. And one healthy baby 
is worth more to herself and to the world than a 
century of sonnets or a magazine page of vers libre . 

In the rare cases where the woman goes on writing 
poetry or painting pictures she never heats man at 
his own game. Her artistic work, however sincere 
or original, is inferior to that of the sex that is meant 
to do these things. Woman is cruder than man; 
her dainty fingers are not so sensitive or so delicate 
in their sense of touch as man’s larger and more bony 
ones. Her mind has not the range or the subtlety 
of man’s. She is content to work on a lower plane, 
producing much that is of beauty or of value, hut 
nothing that is not excelled by man. She is never 


Woman: Her Types 85 

a competitor of man’s in the higher flights of the 
human imagination; she doesn’t need to he. She 
has her own important share of utility and charm 
to contribute to life. And she knows it. After all, 
the cleverness with which she paints her pictures 
is of less importance to the world than the art with 
which she rouges her lips. 

There are other portraits in the gallery of women; 
but they all bear a strong family likeness. Every 
woman is the same woman when it comes to funda¬ 
mentals. The unifying factor that makes all women 
of the same family, as compared with the wider 
range of difference that marks out men, is their de¬ 
pendence upon their sex. A woman’s sex is the 
important thing about her, not her brain, nor the 
colour of her hair. Her sex takes charge of her 
dominates and moulds her. She can never escape 
from her consciousness of sex. 

Man can. He can lose himself in work or pleasure, 
in science or in bridge; hut the greatest girl tennis 
player’s mind is never entirely devoted to the game. 
She is always conscious that she is a woman, and 
she would rather lose the game than have her hair 
come down on the tennis court. 

EVERY WOMAN 

Every woman when she knows that she is in the 
wrong will instinctively accuse the man of being at 


86 Guide Book to Women 


fault. Every woman who proposed to will either 
say, “This is so sudden!” or pretend to think it. 
Every woman’s wristlet watch is always wrong. 
Every woman forgets to wind it up. Every woman 
will discuss every woman’s husband, including her 
own. Every woman has to sit down three times be¬ 
fore she is quite comfortable. Every woman would 
rather be smart than nice. Every woman gets the 
keenest pleasure out of shopping. Every woman 
wants to get married. Every woman is jealous of 
every other woman. Every woman lacks interest in 
machinery. Every woman never is quite sure which 
floor she wants to get out of a lift from. Every 
woman answers back. Every woman sees herself 
more beautiful than she is at her mirror. Every 
woman refuses to cook meals for herself when there 
is no man about. Every woman yawns. Every 
woman has moods when she does things which she 
wouldn’t do when normal. Every woman’s gown 
covers a multitude of pins. Every woman is un¬ 
punctual. Every woman loses parcels. Every woman 
spoils her first baby. Every woman broods over the 
fact that she is a woman. Every woman thinks she 
knows how to dress. Every woman hates darning. 
Every woman when she is half-dressed looks like 
one of those war-pictures of devastated France. Every 
woman hates wind. Every woman needs an occa¬ 
sional hammering. Every woman loves being loved. 


Woman: Her Types 87 

Every woman leaves needles about. Every woman 
worries over her complexion. Every woman wants 
to be either thinner or fatter. Every woman can 
be flattered. Every woman gets the miserables. 
Every woman despises logic. Every woman moons. 
And every woman is a child. 

And aren’t we men forever devoutfully thankful 
that this wonderful and entrancing being never grows 
up! Barrie made Peter Pan a boy. That was his 
most delightful joke. Because every woman knows 
that the world is full of Peter Pans—all women! 


CHAPTER V 


WOMAN : HER BRAIN 

I T is only shirking the question to say that she 
hasn’t any. 

• We are not talking about her soul. In fact, there 
isn’t very much to say about a woman’s soul. She 
has so small a sense of property, being herself, in the 
eyes of the law, merely some man’s property, that 
she is continuously losing things that belong to her, 
such as gloves, her maiden name, parcels, appoint¬ 
ments, her complexion, her temper, umbrellas, and 
time. So it is quite likely that on the Day of Judg¬ 
ment she will turn up in something quite smart in 
resurrection gowns, but will discover that she has 
mislaid her soul. 

But her brain is there, all right. It is a bright, 
beady, glittering, compact little brain, working with, 
a business-like click. It is not a filing cabinet card- 
system brain; it doesn’t work in any recognized order, 
or by any methodical system. It just explodes—and 
out comes the result, like a receipt ticket from a cash 
register. 

As man doesn’t know what to make of it, he calls 
it intuition. He knows that he could never get results 


88 


Woman: Her Brain 


89 

haphazard like that, and he wisely doesn’t try. He 
methodically adds up his facts and writes down the 
result. Woman gets the result without waiting for 
all the facts. If they aren’t there, they ought to he 
there. It’s not a logical world, anyhow; so why 
measure it with the yardstick of logic. 

IF WOMEN WERE LOGICAL 

Then women are illogical ? Why, yes! But what 
man isn’t illogical—man who innately believes he 
can make money at the races, man who is certain that 
the next hand he will hold four aces, man who thinks 
that the woman who wants to escape from her 
family and set up a house of her own loves him for 
himself alone, man who is sure that if he had to play 
that hole again he could do it in four, man who has 
convinced himself that he always knows just when 
to knock off! 

Consider what the world could he like if women 
were logical. We would always know what a woman 
meant and what she was going to do next. She would 
wear logical hats and logical shoes and logical corsets 
—or if she were excessively logical, she would leave 
them off. If a girl loved us she would tell us straight 
off and not keep us guessing for months. And she 
wouldn’t talk unless she had something to say. She 
might even be logical on her honeymoon. 

And just think what that would mean to us. Half 


90 Guide Book to Women 

the fun of proposing to a girl is that you are never 
absolutely sure that she will not turn you down. 
And if you, metaphorically, take away all the 
logical clothes that woman hangs or ties about her, 
what attraction would be left? What sort of a 
woman was Euclid’s wife? History is silent, but 
she was certainly the sort of female that would use 
his forty-seventh problem, over which he had been 
slaving for months and neglecting his meals, for curl 
papers. Q.E.D. 

Woman in her illogical hat and her unsyllogistic 
sentiment is the eternal triumphant challenge to 
political economy. 

A German scientist has recently discovered that 
straight lines are not straight, that light has gone 
on the bend, and that there is a warp or kink in 
space. It took a German scientist to discover that 
when the fact has been known for centuries uncount¬ 
able. The warp in the stuff of the universe is woman. 
There’s a kink in her, and that warp runs through 
all our lives. In fact, it is the warp of woman that 
has produced the universe. Without the warp of 
woman we would he still in the shape of atoms. And 
the first ion of radium that escaped from the radium 
atom was a female. 

Centuries ago woman knew that light could he 
bent. She can see that her hair is tidy at the back 
of her head; and no woman could ever draw a straight 


Woman: Her Brain 


91 

line. She doesn’t need to. She gets there quicker 
by going a longer way round. 

HOW WOME1 ARGUE 

Woman’s brain has made her the supreme chatterer. 
She flits from one subject to the next, leaving the 
man to try in vain to find the connecting link. She 
hovers over one topic for a bright moment, then 
is attracted by the next and flutters away to investi¬ 
gate it. A man hasn’t a chance to keep up with 
her. 

Suppose a husband comes home brimming with 
enthusiasm for some exhilarating subject like, let 
us say, industrial unrest. He is eager to talk the 
matter over with his wife. The debate goes some¬ 
thing like this: 

“This industrial unrest, my dear, is getting serious. 
How, I have been thinking over it and I-” 

“That reminds me, Horace, that Maude wants a 
rise of two shillings a week. She says that Mrs. 
Jones-Smith gives twenty-two and six.” 

“Just as I was going to point out. An admirable 
illustration, from which we may draw the conclusion 
that-” 

“That Maude isn’t telling the truth. I heard 
from Mrs. Johnston that Mrs. Jones-Smith is only 
giving her girl twenty-one shillings. And she isn’t 
worth that.” 




92 


Guide Book to Women 


“Just as I was going to say, my dear. This indus¬ 
trial unrest is permeating-” 

“Yes, the price of meat! I was talking with Mrs. 
Hoops yesterday. You know Mrs. Hoops—wears 
that funny hat, and they do say . . . well, you know. 
Her husband is always going on business trips and 
she—What was I going to say! 0h, yes. The price 
of meat. Well-” 

(You note the connecting link that has swung 
the dear woman on to a new subject? It was the 
word “permeating” which suggested to her vivacious 
mind the topic of “meat.”) 

“Meat?” Horace has to adjust his slowly deto¬ 
nating mind to this new subject. “The price of 
meat is merely a symptom of-” 

“Talking of symptoms, Horace, don’t you think 
that baby is developing a cold ? She’s been feverish 
all day.” 

Her husband dismisses baby by suggesting a dose 
of castor oil. 

“Yes, dear, and do you know what the chemist 
is charging for castor oil now ? Why, it’s-” 

He is not interested in the price of castor oil. 
“It’s the same with all commodities,” he goes dog¬ 
gedly on. “Everything we eat and drink, the clothes 
we wear-” 

“Yes, Horace. I saw a lovely model gown in 







Woman: Her Brain 93 

Blimps’ this afternoon. Nigger brown gabardine, 
you know, with-” 

“It doesn’t matter wbat we take as an example, 
dear. If we look into the conditions of living and 
manufacturing we will find that this industrial 
unrest is both the cause and the effect of high prices. 
For example, take bats——” 

“How can I, Horace?” bis wife plaintively re¬ 
marks. “I was looking over my bats this morning, 
and do you know that I haven’t got a bat to wear. 

There was one I saw this morning, velour, that-” 

Horace is sorry that be has taken bats for bis 
argument. He pauses and attempts to grope for bis 
lost argument. 

His wife eagerly butts in. “I always say that one 
really smart bat, one that all your friends will recog¬ 
nize as the real thing, is far better and more econo¬ 
mical in the end than two cheaper bats that aren’t 
quite up to date.” 

Horace has beard that before. All husbands have 
beard that before. It is such a help when the bill 
for the model hat comes in. Horace goes lumbering 
on with his argument. It was quite a clear argu¬ 
ment when be started it, but now it seems to have 
fallen over its own feet entangled in nigger brown 
and velour. He cranks up again, but— 

“You’ll have to get your hair cut again, Horace,” 
his wife abruptly remarks. “It makes you look so 





94 Guide Book to Women 

middle-aged when you let your hair come down to 
your ears.” 

“Too busy to-day,” he apologizes. Now, where 
was he ? He never finds out, because Billy has spilt 
his gravy on the table-cloth, and after that his wife 
wants to know exactly what he did that day at the 
office and what he said to him and what the other 
man said when he said that. And then she has to 
tell all about everything that she did that day and 
what Mrs. Who’s This had said to her and what she 
had told Mrs. Who’s This, and that Mrs. Whatdye- 
callim is “expecting” another, the third, and that she 
is just dying for a boy. 

That is industrial unrest in the home. 

What husband hasn’t come home with a had head¬ 
ache, miserably hoping for sympathy, and found that 
his wife has got in ahead of him? She has had a 
bad headache, too, all day—and that’s all he gets 
out of his headache. 

THAT PRESENT TO YOUR WIFE 

Woman’s brain is so quick that from three isolated 
facts she can construct a whole film scenario. She 
seizes upon the fact that her husband had to go back 
to the office for important cables that night, instead 
of taking her to the picture show. Fact one. Next 
morning notices that he has a smear of face-powder 
on his coat—a differently scented face-powder to the 


Woman: Her Brain 


95 


one she uses. Fact two. Not much to go on, as 
yet. But that evening he brings her home that bead 
handbag which she had been wanting him to buy 
for weeks. Fact three. 

That settles it. If only husbands knew how unwise 
it is to bring home an unexpected and expensive 
present to their wives they wouldn’t so often break 
up their homes. That string of near-pearls is a 
string of remorse. Here he is out enjoying himself 
and poor little wifey is staying dully at home, mend¬ 
ing his socks. Well, hang the expense, she shall 
have her pearls! And the husband feels such a 
glow of generosity in buying wifey that present that 
he immediately arranges for some more important 
cables to detain him at the office next Thursday 
evening. 

The wife adds up 1, her husband’s late night out; 
2, the wrong face-powder; and 3, the pearls—and 
it tots up one tragedy, with a divorce case as the 
climax. 

Man is a poor liar. He gets on well enough in 
business because in business he has only to meet other 
poor liars. But when he lies to a woman he is a crude 
amateur competing with an expert. 

NATURE’S BEST JOKE 

Woman’s brain is fortunately deficient in a sense 
of humour. There has never been a female humorist 


96 Guide Book to Women 

in the world. Luckily for us; for if women had the 
sense of humour keenly developed—oh, wouldn’t they 
find us funny! 

But it will be objected that women laugh more 
easily than do men. And they laugh with the whole 
of their faces, while men merely grin. This proves 
the point. The great humorists of the world have 
seldom smiled. They were mostly married. 

-No woman admits that she lacks a sense of humour. 
That, again, proves the point. There is no such 
animal as a wife without a smile. A woman always 
laughs at what she doesn’t understand. That is why 
she so frequently laughs at herself. It is always a 
woman’s laugh that comes at the tensest and more 
serious moment of a drama. And at the most solemn 
instant of her life she smiles—that fateful instant 
when she accepts the man who loves her. Fate smiles, 
too. 

Nature has been wise in withholding the gift of 
humour from women. Even a rudimentary sense 
of humour in a wife leads straight to the divorce 
court. When a husband appears funny to his wife 
love flies out of the window. Man is differently made. 
He can find his wife laughable and lovable. He 
can see her foolishness and her ineffectiveness and 
her lack of brain, and love her all the more for it. 
The more foolish she is the fonder he gets of her. 
He adores her logic as much as he likes her lips. 


Woman: Her Brain 


97 


Considered philosophically, woman is Nature’s finest 
joke—a joke that is eternally repeated and never gets 
stale. 

Nobody ever knows what a woman will do next. 
For herself, she doesn’t try. Condemned to a dull 
round of daily existence, she is always expecting the 
unexpected. The world would he a happier world if 
husbands more often ran amok. A little madness in 
a man is necessary for his wife. 

TAKING HER TO THE THEATRE 

You decide to take your wife or your girl to the 
theatre. You mention the fact at breakfast or at 
the office and decide to get tickets for Wednesday. 
Everything is arranged, and therefore everything is 
dull. You go on Wednesday and that is all there is 
about it. 

But the wise husband, having decided to take his 
wife to the theatre on Wednesday, says nothing about 
it. On Wednesday evening, however, he arrives late 
home for dinner, bursts in and remarks, “We’re going 
to see that show to-night, old girl! Here are the 
tickets! Get a move on, now! Nonsense, you’ve got 
plenty of dresses, and it won’t take you twenty min¬ 
utes to change.” 

Instantly your wife is excited and delighted. And 
how she loves you for that rash impulse! She is 


98 Guide Book to Women 

actually ready to catch the tram. If she had had a 
week’s warning she would have missed that tram. 

And after the theatre you suddenly suggest that 
you must have supper. Of course, you have reserved 
your seats at the restaurant, but you disguise the fact. 
And that night your wife is perfectly happy, and 
thanks her gods for a husband that has the saving 
grace of madness in him. 

For woman—there, the secret is out!—is the 
eternal child. Her days are dreams of excitement 
that seldom come off. She is pleased with a toy or 
a hunch of roses, and her birthday is a birthday 
party. Wives even get excited over their husbands’ 
birthdays. 

There was once a man who married a humorous 
wife. His sense of humour was so strong that he 
had to marry her. It was the most melancholy of 
marriages. The wedding service struck them both 
as shriekingly humorous and the honeymoon was 
laughed out of court. 

Considered with detachment a kiss is a ludicrous 
jest. A woman’s figure is almost as funny as a man’s. 
An embrace is the utmost in the ridiculous. A man 
in pyjamas is a figure for humour. If in the middle 
of a kiss a woman sees its humour that is the murder 
of that kiss. A smile in the middle of an embrace is 
more paralysing than a yawn. 


Woman: Her Brain 


99 


THE YAWN 

Women and the cat and tiger tribe are the only 
animals that continually yawn. Observe any gather¬ 
ing of men and women, at a concert, on a tram, in 
the street, and you will find that the first person to 
yawn is a woman. Her mind has fewer subjects to 
occupy it in her spare moments than man’s. For 
a man’s contact with the world and the variety of 
his activities seldom leave his majestic mind un¬ 
occupied. 

When he ceases wondering whether he will back 
that horse for the Cup, his mental apparatus turns 
quite easily to the alluring possibilities of another 
little drink. When he has discussed that, his thoughts 
switch naturally on to the question whether his swing 
of his brassey can be improved by that grip Brown 
told him about last Sunday. He hasn’t quite settled 
that important question when he wonders whether 
that girl in front of him—he has unconsciously in¬ 
creased his pace down the street—will look as 
alluring from the front as she looks seen from 
behind. Though he knows that her face or her age 
will certainly give her away he hurries on; and to 
get over his disappointment he allows his mind 
idly to drift to the four kings he held last night at 
the club. That exquisite subject having been gloated 
over he harks back to the curves and the provocative 


ioo Guide Book to Women 


open-work of his new stenographer and hnilds rosy 
pictures of a temporary future. Then, lingeringly, 
he gets hack to tin tacks, and shifts his whole intel¬ 
lectual apparatus to the question of the excuse he will 
offer his wife for his late night next week. 

It is only when entering his front door that his 
mind becomes blank enough to allow him to yawn. 

It is this wide and diverse range of subjects for 
deep thought that keeps man’s mental equipment 
sparking properly. Woman has only four topics that 
really interest her. Dress, men, babies and meat. 
And these subjects for thought are not sufficient to 
occupy even a woman’s mind. It is as easy and as 
natural for a woman to yawn as to smile. And when 
she is not doing one she is doing the other. 

And it must be remembered that the majority of 
her yawns comes from the fact that she is brooding 
over being a woman. 

Woman’s most natural method of argument is the 
Hint. She works tortuously to her aim by wander¬ 
ing all around the subject. Suppose she has a wed¬ 
ding anniversary a month off. Her husband always 
brings her home an anniversary present, and somehow 
he never forgets the date and never makes a mistake 
by buying the wrong present. Even the most forget¬ 
ful of husbands remembers his wedding anniversary, 
provided he is properly tfained by his wife. 



Woman: Her Brain 


IOI 


THE ANNIVERSARY^ PRESENT 

Of course the best thing about the present is its 
unexpectedness. A present expected is no present 
to a woman. In her eager little anticipatory mind 
she has almost worn out that string of pearls that 
her husband has promised her by the time it comes 
home. 

So one of the rules of the game of anniversary 
presents is that the wife must never know what she 
is going to get or whether she is going to get it. The 
idea is to make her husband suddenly decide that a 
string of pearls is just the thing for his wife’s plump 
neck. And he is tickled to death at his cleverness 
in thinking of such an unexpected and so desirable 
a present for the dear unsuspicious little woman. 

The game begins months before the date. 

“Why,” she exclaims, looking excitedly up from 
the page in the morning paper that contains the 
advertisements, “it’s only three months till we’ll have 
been married nine years!” 

“Will it, dear ?” her husband murmurs behind his 
paper. 

That’s enough for that day. A week later his 
wife remarks, “I saw Mrs. Twice at the concert last 
night, and she was wearing such a lovely string of 
pearls.” 

“Well, old Twice made more than the price of a 


102 Guide Book to Women 


string of pearls out of leather during the war. Every 
war profiteer’s wife has to wear a pearl necklace. 
Otherwise, how could her acquaintances tell she was 
a profitess ?” 

“But with a scraggy neck like hers-!” 

“Like pocketing your opponent’s ball,” her hus¬ 
band replies. 

“I always think that no woman ought to wear 
pearls unless she has a nice neck and shoulders.” 

Her husband can’t help glancing at his wife’s nice 
neck. “Like yours, my dear,” he idly remarks, and 
thinks, poor man, that he has neatly dismissed the 
subject with a compliment. 

But pearls as a subject are not to he lightly dis¬ 
missed by any woman. “Oh, my amber beads will 
do me,” she remarks. “It’s different with Mrs. Twice. 
He can afford them.” 

“And we can’t, eh?” her husband laughs. “If it 
comes to that,” he braces himself, “I daresay old 
Twice would have to buck up if I started in on 
pearls.” 

“How, you mustn’t be silly,” she smilingly re¬ 
proves him. “There’s heaps of other things, more 
useful things, that we need. Pearls! Time enough 
to think of things like that when we’re millionaires!” 
She can’t help sighing. “Only, by that time, dear, 
I’m afraid I won’t want to show my neck much.” 
“Honsense!” he remarks. 




Woman: Her Brain 


103 


The subject drops for a few weeks. It exclusively 
occupies the mind of the wife during that period, 
and is never referred to by her. In her husband’s 
mind it simmers vaguely. 

“What are you wearing those coloured beads for ?” 
he asks one evening. “They don’t suit you at all.” 

“Ho ? . . . I’m not very keen on them myself. 
They’re only imitation, you know. But I can’t go 
on wearing my amber beads with every dress I put 
on. They don’t go with this gown, I know; but I 
get tired of amber.” 

Unconsciously her husband is getting tired of 
amber, too. That is all part of the treatment. Mean¬ 
while, he has quite forgotten the wedding anniver¬ 
sary. Too busy with a big deal in his business to 
think about things that don’t matter. 

“When are you going to take your holidays ?” his 
wife one day asks. 

“Holidays ?” He is surprised. “Let me see, what 
date is it ? The seventeenth!” 

“Why!” His wife is surprised. “That’s just a 
week from the day we were married. Fancy, we’ll 
be married nine years on. the twenty-fourth!” 

“Really! . . . Yes, must be all that. But it 
seems to have flown, hasn’t it ? Well, well!” 

That is enough about that. But the time has come 
for direct action. His wife starts next morning at 
breakfast. 


104 Guide Book to Women 

“I see that Baldwin’s are advertising such lovely 
pearl necklaces.” 

Pearl necklaces ? Where had he heard those words 
before? . . . Oh, yes. Mrs. Twice is wearing 
them . . . scraggy neck . . . amber heads. . . . 
Plump shoulders . . . look well on Alice’s neck. . . . 
Useless things, though . . . cost a lot of hard cash 
. . . still, they don’t wear Out . . . likely to go 
up in value, too. . . . Sort of investment . . . please 
the wife. . . . Hm! 

But that day and the following one he is too busy 
to carry out his vague intention of dropping along 
to Baldwin’s and looking their pearl-strings over. 

Next morning, however, the direct action method 
is tightened up. 

“It’s rather silly, don’t you think, for married 
people to give each other presents at their wedding 
anniversaries ?” his wife smiles. “But I’m going to 
get you some little thing, as usual, dear, even though 
we are an old married couple. I thought of a new 
pair of pyjamas. You know you do want a new suit.” 

“Do I, Alice ? Bight. That reminds me, is there 
anything you’d particularly like ? Of course, I can’t 
go to anything expensive; but ... is there any little 
thing that you’ve set your heart on ?” 

No; there was nothing she wanted. Just as a 
memento, though, some little thing would he rather 
fun, wouldn’t it ? Nothing elaborate, of course. He 


Woman: Her Brain 


105 


didn’t want to shower things on her, and just for 
a stupid old thing like a wedding anniversary! 
H0-00! She could think of nothing. But he might 
see some little thing in the shops. It really didn’t 
matter what it was, as long as it was a surprise. She 
did love surprises . . . and it was nice to remember 
birthdays and things like that, wasn’t it? Only he 
mustn’t tell her what it was going to he. It would 
spoil all the fun of opening the parcel, wouldn’t it ? 

And on the morning of the wedding anniversary, 
she woke up to find a neat parcel, and feverishly 
opening it she found the pearl necklace. 

“Just what I wanted, dear,” she happily crooned, 
putting it on. She gave him an excited kiss and 
rushed to look at herself in the mirror. “Just the 
right length, and oh, what lovely pearls! However 
did you know I’d love a pearl necklace? And how 
did you have the taste to choose just this one ?” 

He explained. He had gone to Baldwin’s . . . 
well, because it was the best place for pearls. He 
knew that, though pearls were out of his line. But 
he had always heard that Baldwin’s was the shop. 
Ho difficulty in making a choice. This was the one 
necklace that would suit her. Picked it out at once. 

And he really had. For his wife had visited Bald¬ 
win’s the week before and had carefully inspected 
every pearl necklace in the shop. She had taken* 
her bosom friend with her; and the two had had a 


io6 Guide Book to Women 


wonderful day trying on millions of pounds’ worth 
of pearls and seeing how they fitted. For pearl 
necklaces, like gowns and hats, must be tried on and 
fitted to match the neck and shoulders. And usually 
the hair must be done all over again. 

She had made her choice and informed the shop¬ 
man that when her husband arrived he was on no 
account to be allowed to select any other. 

TRUE STORY OF THE APPLE 

Woman was just the same in the Garden of Eden. 
It is stated that though she knew that the apple tree 
was forbidden she saw the tree and that it was good 
for fruit and that it was pleasant to the eyes and a 
tree to be desired to make one wise. So, of course, 
she picked the ripest and biggest apple and handed 
it to the unsuspicious Adam ? 

Hot if she was Eve. She would never have looked 
at the tree if it had not been called to her notice and 
marked as forbidden. But once she was aware of 
that she simply couldn’t help hanging around it. She 
lost her appetite for nuts so obviously that Adam 
remarked on her losing weight. He wouldn’t have 
noticed it if she hadn’t discreetly suggested it. Ho; 
there was nothing particular she craved for . . . but 
she had heard that apples were good for the com¬ 
plexion. 

“Apples?” said Adam, ‘‘Hewer heard of them. 


Woman: Her Brain 107 

But you show me where they grow and Ill get you 
some.” 

“Oh, no, darling. You mustn’t. Don’t you know 
they’re forbidden?” she resignedly sighed. 

Adam remembered. So apples were off. 

“I wonder what their taste is like?” she idly re¬ 
marked, ruffling up Adam’s red hair. It was a new 
sensation for Adam, and he liked it. 

“And they look so beautiful, don’t they? And 
I’m sure they are good for the digestion. And then, 
you know, Adamie, that if I ate one it would make 
me wise.” 

Adam sat up. Eve was certainly annoyingly de¬ 
ficient in wisdom. She never knew when to let him 
alone, and she was always so curious to know what 
he had been doing every minute of the day. And 
though she was great on table decorations her cooking 
was atrocious. A pity that apples were on the pro¬ 
hibited list. 

When they went for their Sunday afternoon stroll 
she directed his steps to the forbidden tree. She had 
hoped that there might be a windfall under it; but 
though the tree was covered with ripe apples none 
had fallen. 

“If a big wind would only come . . . ?” Eve 
sighed. “Do you see that big rosy apple near the 
top? You’re so strong and such a good shot that 
I’m sure you could knock that one down with a cocoa- 


io8 Guide Book to Women 


nut. But, of course, that would be just the same as 
picking it, wouldn’t it ? So we’d better go straight 
home to our Sunday tea, though there is nothing to 
eat but nuts.” 

Eve simply couldn’t eat anything that evening. 
She complained of a headache and went straight to 
bed. And for three days she stayed in bed, obviously 
pining for apples, though she was very brave and 
never mentioned the silly fruit. And Adam had to 
do his own cooking and washing-up and—what every 
husband hates—clear out the grate. 

Well, there was nothing for it. That night Adam 
crept out and plucked the largest apple in sight, 
sneaked home and placed it beside her pillow. And 
when he woke in the morning there was only the core 
left—and Eve was waiting by the bedside with a nice 
hot cup of morning tea—made out of nuts and water 
—for him. And when he got up he found that last 
night’s washing-up had been done and that the grate 
had been cleared out and a new fire set. 

The improvement in Eve’s complexion was imme¬ 
diate. She had no more headaches, and Adam’s hair 
got all the ruffling that it wanted. 

He kept a good look-out for the appearance of 
wisdom in Eve’s little brain. And he was not dis¬ 
appointed; for the first thing she said to him after 
breakfast was, “Do you know, ducky diddums, I 
simply haven’t got a single smart fig-leaf to wear!” 


CHAPTER VI 


WOMAN I HER SOUL 

W OMAN’S sole is smaller than man’s, and of a 
different shape. It is not so wide in the tread, 
and it is much more pointed. It is much thinner than 
a man’s, and consequently it wears out much sooner. 
And it never really keeps out the wet. 

For further details of woman’s soul see page 999. 
(Note for Printer: The number of that page 
should be a page that is not in the book. Some num¬ 
ber after the number of the last page will do.) 


109 


CHAPTER VII 


WOMAN : HER LIFE 

“ T T’S a girl!” the nurse says—and you know the 
A worst. 

You had wandered away from the house to await 
the result. You had discovered the moment the nurse 
arrived that you weren’t wanted, that you were no 
use, that the farther you got off the landscape the 
more pleased everybody concerned would he. 

You wandered disconsolately about the garden, 
wondering how many hours you would have to put 
in. And then you had heard that cat in the garden. 
It kept faintly mewing. You peered among the 
shrubs to find it, and you couldn’t. Well, better get 
back to the house and hang about for any news. And 
immediately you entered the door you heard that cat 
mewing again, mewing lustily. Where was it? It 
must be put out at once. It might disturb Her. . . .” 

Why, the confounded thing was mewing in the 
bedroom! . . . And then the nurse had tiptoed 
out. . . . 

Of course, you had wanted a boy. You always do 
want a boy—unless you have got five boys. And 
then you don’t get one. 

no 


Woman: Her Life 


ill 


You want a boy because—well, it all comes down 
to tbis, you want him to carry on the name. Your 
name, your important name. Well, just sit down 
for thirty minutes and see if you can rake up any 
real reason why your name should be carried on. . . . 

You can’t be ambitious for a girl. You bring her 
up and educate her and expensively “finish” her; 
and a total stranger comes along and grabs the 
finished product. And just at the time when she is 
becoming useful about the house and beginning to 
repay you for all your expense. And that’s the end 
of your name. 

But a boy is a much more worrying job than a 
girl. Boys are infinitely more difficult to rear. The 
chances of a boy reaching maturity are less than those 
of a girl. For the female is the more resistant to 
disease, the longer liver. A girl’s chance to become 
a widow is much brighter than a boy’s chance to 
become a widower. That is probably why women 
rush matrimony more eagerly than men. 

This uncertainty about the sex of the expected 
baby is sufficiently worrying as it is. Nature ought 
to put up a danger signal when it is to be another 
girl. You are about to add a new factor to your life, 
one that will alter the whole of your future outlook 
and actions; and you don’t know whether that new 
factor will wear trousers or “them.” 

The baby girl grows up. 


112 Guide Book to Women 


From the very beginning the baby is a woman. 
And to the very end the woman remains a baby. 
Every female is a mother from birth. The child 
begins by mothering a doll; later she mothers a hus¬ 
band; then she mothers a child; then she mothers 
a few affable strangers; and finally she mothers a 
grandchild. She is both mother and child all her 
life. 


HER ARTIFICIAL INSTINCTS 

The woman of civilization, however, begins early 
with an artificial instinct as strong as the natural 
instinct of motherhood. No small girl needs to be 
taught the value and the thrill of dress. From the 
earliest stages her greatest delight is to be allowed 
to put on her party dress. And if every woman knew 
the exact date of her own death she would order the 
smartest and most expensive costume for the event 
that could be found in the shops. Anyhow, her 
widower would have to pay the bill. 

Her third instinct is the cuddling instinct. The 
small girl loves to be cuddled. Boys soon begin to 
dislike sleeping in the same bed as their brothers; 
but sisters love to sleep together. This cuddling 
instinct survives in adult life. 

The child becomes a flapper and makes the tre¬ 
mendous discovery that there are boys in the world. 
Her freedom and her frankness disappear, carefully 


Woman: Her Life 113 

covered up beneath her protective armour of dissimu¬ 
lation. She learns the terror and the triumphs of 
immature love; she is caught up on wild currents of 
thrills and moods; she is all one amazement of won¬ 
der over herself. Depressions, exaltations, yearnings 
and fears alternate in her confused soul. She is 
whirled on by unknown and irresistible forces; she 
shivers and she blushes. Life has taken hold of her. 

The sway of sex forces her into unknown regions. 
She breaks out into a brief efflorescence of her sub- 
consciousness that is now in charge of her conscious 
self. She writes poetry; she faints; she has moods 
of despair and of ecstasy. 

That steadies, passes; and she begins to enjoy the 
game of flirtation for its own sake. She is infinitely 
older than the youth of her age. The hysteria goes; 
she begins to find her feet. The world, she finds, 
is a world for women. Shops are built and furnished 
for her. Cities are founded for her. Everything rare 
and wonderful is made or procured for her. The 
universe exists but to deck her out; civilization has 
been laboriously evolved but to win her careless smile. 
She has only to amuse herself—and wait till He 
comes along. And sometimes she has nothing else to 
do for the rest of her life but wait for Him. . . . 

But, thanks to Nature, who has a kindly soul when 
she wants things done, marriage usually happens. 
That is just it—it happens. The urge of the sex- 


114 Guide Book to Women 

impulse takes no account of compatibility of temper 
or of brain or of character. Nature’s sole idea is to 
marry ’em off as quickly as she can. She doesn’t 
really care whether they are married or not, so long 
as they produce the baby. But since man has for¬ 
mulated his own laws on the subject Nature doesn’t 
object—so long as there is a baby, preferably heaps 
of babies. No young man wants to marry a girl 
to make her the mother of his child. All he wants is 
that girl. And though no doubt the idea of a little 
baby all of her own, to spoil and cuddle and dress up, 
is always at the back of the woman’s brain, it isn’t 
the father that she sees in Him, but the lover—and 
the fiercer the better. 

SHOULD A HUSBAND TELL? 

Should a husband confess ? Should he tell his new- 
made wife all the shocking details of his horrible 
past ? Certainly! 

To begin with, his young wife knows he has had 
a past. She is not jealous of his past, as long as it 
does not lap over into the present or the future. In 
fact, the average bride looks to find in her husband 
someone who knows the game. She is, of course, 
an amateur; and he is a professional. He has had 
the experience, the practice that have been denied 
her. The modern girl is beginning to ask why. 


Woman: Her Life 


115 

She doesn’t want to muddle this difficult business 
of marriage right at the start. She assumes that 
her husband will know what to do. She would be 
very much exasperated if he didn’t. She looks to 
him for guidance, for knowledge; for even the flirti- 
est flirt has great gaps of ignorance about herself and 
him. 

And how could he get the necessary knowledge ex¬ 
cept by practice? He brings to married life the 
advantages of a handicap—except, of course, when 
he weds a widow. There must have been other women 
in his life. Well, why shouldn’t he confess it? 

Besides, the bride is always intensely curious about 
those other women, those unknown predecessors of 
her. What were they like ? Were they prettier than 
she ? What attracted him to them ? And what and 
where are they all now ? 

And when her husband confesses she will And 
that not one of the lot was in the least like her. How 
could any of them be like her, when he had married 
her? 

So every new husband is advised to tell his wife 
the tale of his awful past. And there will be few 
wives who will not be painfully disappointed at the 
recital: One of the reasons why she married Hector 
was that she thought from his eyes and that little 
greyness on the temples that he had been a Regular 
Devil with women. And now it appears that all his 


n6 Guide Book to Women 


experiences with them would almost have been passed 
by the National Board of Censors: there wasn’t one 
great Passion among the list. 

»So every husband is advised to tell his wife the 
tale of his youthful indiscretions—and make them 
as hot as he can. The more acres of wild oats he says 
he has sown the better she will like it—and him. 
His young wife will begin to wonder why she mar¬ 
ried him if he didn’t turn out to be a Regular Devil. 
So, for the future happiness of your marriage, con¬ 
fess, tell the whole truth and all the untruths that 
will add to the effect. The more women you populate 
your past with the better your wife will lfke you. 
For, consider the compliment. You had had all those 
passionate creatures in love with you, one after the 
other, or—this is a good touch—several contempor¬ 
aneously, and yet you left those sinuous vampires to 
wed your dear little wife! Won’t the dear little 
woman glow and thrill at the thought! 

Kiss and tell. Tell, even if you haven’t kissed. 

A much more difficult problem is whether the bride 
should tell. But the question calls for no answer, 
for, of course, she has nothing to tell. 

IN' TROUBLE 

Now about the unwanted baby. They do happen, 
even nowadays. The popular belief is that once a 
girl has a baby before she has a marriage certificate 


Woman: Her Life 


117 


she is mined, a fallen woman and other dreadful 
adjectives. How often we have seen her on the 
stage! The fact that she is always the most beauti¬ 
ful girl in the play and invariably wears the nicest 
clothes is some compensation—and unwittingly true 
to life. For nobody wants to get the unattractive girl 
into trouble; she has troubles enough of her own. 

When the heroine produces the child to her proud 
parents they instantly show her to the door, they 
bundle her and her encumbrance—ter use the land¬ 
lord’s phrase—out into the exact centre of the snow¬ 
storm that was waiting just around the corner for her 
to step into. 

In real life when a mother hears from her daughter 
the dreadful fact, her first instinct is to look after 
her. Certainly she does not advertise the fact to 
the neighbours; but she cares for the daughter and— 
when it arrives—the child. There is no question of 
forgiveness—mothers are not made like that. And 
though father, when the news is broken to him, 
might be pained and explosive in his language, he, 
too, can be brought around to the natural viewpoint 
of common humanity. 

The family is an entity; what hurts one member 
hurts them all; they are armed against the world; 
and in the end the kiddie is brought up as one of 
the family, and has just as good a chance in the world 
as any other mortal. For the offence is not one 


n8 Guide Book to Women 


against Nature, but against man-made rules. Given 
the right circumstances Nature will produce a baby; 
but Nature has never produced or signed a marriage 
certificate. 

It was wrong of the girl, but frequently it is the 
mother of that girl who is the real wrong-doer. It 
is a mistake that is terribly punished, and the punish¬ 
ment most unfairly falls on the more innocent of the 
two sinners. Well, the common humanity of the 
family comes to the weak one’s rescue. There are 
more heinous sins than this one condoned by Nature. 

The wife who marries a man and refuses to have 
a child is infinitely more criminal. She is sinning 
not only against the race but against Nature. Called 
by some other name she would not sound so sweet. 
And not so honest. The purpose of marriage, and 
it is put with brutal frankness in the marriage ser¬ 
vice, as many a bride has discovered, is the procrea¬ 
tion of children; the union of man and woman is 
Nature’s method of keeping the race alive; and it 
is a sneaking treachery both to the laws of man¬ 
kind and the infinitely more important laws of 
Nature. The deliberately childless wife shirks her 
job because it might spoil her figure. 

But Nature sees to that. She has in wait for the 
wife without a child all sorts of unpleasantness in 
the way of illnesses and operations. And the fact 
that a woman can get quite a comfort out of discuss- 


Woman: Her Life 


119 

ing the operations she has gone through does not 
quite compensate for those experiences. Though to 
listen to some of them, you would think it did. 

THE SECOND BLOOMING 

The average wife has her usual exciting girlish 
experiences before she enters the doldrums of matri¬ 
mony. But once in that safe haven she relapses into 
double-bed dullness, varied by the arrival of babies. 
So through her married life her experiences are con¬ 
fined to the one man. She may have her little flirta¬ 
tions ; but she shivers when the other man shows that 
he is in earnest. He usually is, being built that way. 

But it is a generally admitted fact that to married 
women there comes in time a second blooming. She 
wakes up to the dullness of her husband and the alive- 
ness of herself. Custom stales even the most tem¬ 
pestuous honeymoon; and Nature herself calms her 
passions. The pair grow accustomed to each other; 
their love is like their breakfast—something essential 
but hardly stimulating. There are no cocktails nor 
liqueurs at breakfast. Passion does not thrive on the 
bacon and eggs of the married breakfast. The pas¬ 
sionate surprises of bacon and eggs are soon ex¬ 
hausted. 

Then one day the wife wakes up. She makes the 
tremendous discovery that she is physically attract¬ 
ive to men, and that she has become stale to her 


120 Guide Book to Women 


husband. She finds that other men are interested 
in her; and naturally she is thrilled. 

She takes this new interest in herself as some¬ 
thing new. She does not know that all women are 
sought after by the pirate male. She does not know 
that a married woman is especially pursued. For the 
married woman is, to some extent, an expert in love. 
She has served a long apprenticeship in the trade. 
Whereas the unmarried female is only an amateur. 
Besides, married women are easier. 

Be it clearly understood that these are the beliefs 
of the pirate male, who is accustomed to flatter him¬ 
self that all women are legitimately his prey. But— 
most emphatically—all women, or a majority of 
women, aren’t. And those of the sex who get into 
trouble are those, and only those, who are either con¬ 
sciously or subconsciously looking for it. 

Still, it is delightful for the wife who has reached 
her second blooming to find that she is desirous to 
others than her husband. She is thrilled and flat¬ 
tered. She blooms. This is no metaphorical term; 
the fact that a woman is sought stimulates her, 
freshens her, irradiates her, brings back her youth. 
A trivial flirtation will take years off a married 
woman’s complexion. She has something to live for, 
somebody to please, somebody to admire her. She 
is no longer the matutinal daily bacon and eggs. She 
is a creme de menthe> to be deliciously sipped. 


Woman: Her Life 


121 


The period of the second blooming of married 
women varies. It all depends on the speed of her 
married life. It may happen within five years; it 
may eventuate after twelve years of married life and 
five children. For by that time she has done with 
children; she finds her greatest mainstay in surmount¬ 
ing the dullness of married life—her love for and 
care of the children—suddenly taken from her. The 
kiddies grow out of their early troubles; they shake 
themselves free from her devotion; she finds her 
vocation gone. 

And she looks around, and finds the whole world 
packed with semi-detached men who, if she gives 
them the slightest encouragement, will make polite 
or impolite love to her. And she finds that there 
is nothing else for her to do, nothing else that will 
so perfectly fill in her spare time. 

There is no second blooming for the married man. 
The male of the species blooms all the time. He is 
always ready to experiment in amorous adventures. 
There is, unfortunately, no close season for married 
men. They can be made love to on sight. 

ONE LAW FOR BOTH 

“One law for both sexes” is an admirable copy-book 
maxim. But it doesn’t work. At least it doesn’t 
work overtime. 

And it is the sex which demands the same law for 


122 Guide Book to Women 


both sexes that refuses to take this new command¬ 
ment seriously. In her heart a woman doesn’t be¬ 
lieve in this law. 

The plain fact is that the average wife looks with 
less concern on her husband’s lapses than he would 
look on hers. She seems to accept the fact that he 
has been false to her almost as casually as she accepts 
his occasional drunkenness. Of course, it is a pain¬ 
ful shock for an unsuspicious and loving wife when 
she finds that invariable compromising letter in her 
husband’s pocket. Incidentally, why does the woman 
always write that letter, and why doesn’t the hus¬ 
band immediately tear it up and burn the fragments ? 
That is one of the conundrums of our civilization; 
and it is upon this conundrum that the imposing 
edifice of our divorce court is built. 

Yes, it is a shock for wifey; but, after all, is it a 
greater shock than the first time hubby comes home 
intoxicated with something even stronger than mari¬ 
tal affection ? Husbands do drink; and wives do put 
up with them. Husbands do lust after the stranger 
woman, and wives weep awhile and—put up with 
the erring males. There is a scene, of course; and 
the wife weeps and the husband swears he will never 
do it again, and swears some other things; and the 
wife forgives him, and in her mind, finds a feminine 
excuse for him. What else can she do? she reflects 
dolefully. Men are like that. Especially married 


Woman: Her Life 


123 


men. Even her Alfred. She would be horribly up¬ 
set if he had committed embezzlement or burglary; 
as it is, she has found him out and he has promised 
never to see the hussy again. 

For every woman knows how easy men are. They 
exist solely to be the prey of the designing female. 
Men are fatally easy for women. They can no more 
resist a woman than they can resist a drink. And 
the average wife will reflect that if men weren’t so 
fatally easy she wouldn’t have got her husband at 
all. So, unwittingly, she instinctively finds excuses 
for him. The woman was a designing cat, and poor 
Alfred simply hadn’t a chance against her. 

So the “One Law for Both Sexes” hasn’t a chance. 
The man obviously doesn’t want that law; and the 
woman finds excuses for him if he transgresses it. 

LOOKING FOR TROUBLE 

It has been laid down as the first precept in the 
Book of the Much-Married, that strange compilation 
made by the Pink Lamas of Packapu in the seventh 
century, “that any Rounded Female may acquire any 
Male if she Knows the Way and is Prepared to Take 
the Consequences.” 

There are two foot-notes to this precept, evidently 
inscribed several centuries later by scribes unknown 
who apparently had tested the precept. The first foot¬ 
note runs: “This precept does not apply to Rounded 


124 Guide Book to Women 

Females under the age of eleven or over the age of 
eighty-three.” The second foot-note may be trans¬ 
lated thus: “The Male is forever Looking for 
Trouble, especially the Sort of Trouble that Doesn’t 
Wear Trousers.” 

There must be quite a lot of esoteric wisdom hidden 
away in the hitherto untranslated works of the Pink 
Lamas of Packapu. 

For the modern male has an instinct for trouble. 
And when he finds trouble giving him the glad eye, 
he surrenders. From time immemorable it has been 
his privilege and his job to make the advances neces¬ 
sary to attract the diffident, but not too diffident, 
female. He has to pursue her; and often he has to 
remain blind to the fact that she doesn’t run her 
darnedest. Anyhow, how could she, in those skirts ? 

So when women butt into the game that belongs 
to the man, they have a tremendously unfair advan¬ 
tage over him. 

All he needs is a hint to imagine the most delight¬ 
ful possibilities. And often a light-hearted woman 
will give a hint without meaning any possibilities. 
For the most important discovery yet recorded about 
woman is that she doesn’t mean half what she looks, 
and doesn’t mean anything she says. 

A woman can’t help putting a meaning into her 
eyes that isn’t there. And to discover what she 
really means a man has to divide by two hundred and 


Woman: Her Life 


125 


thirty-five. For all her life a woman is excited hy 
the presence of the mere man. She can no more help 
attracting him, or striving to attract him, than she 
can help lying to him. She is built to attract; and 
even in the presence of a blind man she will preen 
herself and practise that dimple on her left cheek. 
Her antennae are always fluttering in the air, seek¬ 
ing unconsciously to send the wireless signals of her 
sex to the nearest receiving station. She is all sex, 
whereas man occasionally takes a few hours off for 
golf or billiards or even business. But woman is 
woman all the time, whereas man may he for the 
most of his working day an accountant or a wharf- 
lumper. 


TEY THIS EXPERIMENT 

Try this experiment. FTo matter what sort of 
woman you are—for in the thing that really matters, 
sex, all women are the same sort of woman—the next 
time you are in a tram give the discreetest glad eye 
to the most respectable man you see. Will he give 
you the haughty, touch-me-not stare of grim respecta¬ 
bility ? Will he, even when he is not with his wife, 
blush furiously and straighten his tie? Will he 
escape at the next stopping-place and hasten blubber¬ 
ing home to his wife ? 

Ho; he will instantly sit up and take notice. That 
is his job, taking notice. He will return your glance 


126 Guide Book to Women 


and your greeting; and he will willingly pay another 
fare in order to get out of the tram when you do. 
Where women are concerned a man does not worry 
over the expense. They are worth it, every time, ex¬ 
cept when you are married to one of them. 

A woman has only to make the slightest advance, 
and instantly and automatically a man will have 
mentally reached the stage when he has kissed her, 
and is wondering what the dear thing will do next. 

But if this test is reversed, and a man tries it on 
even a woman of sixty, he will receive the icy stare 
of disdain. Women are habituated to this unceasing 
and promiscuous pursuit; and the woman of sixty 
is the most habituated of them all. The woman’s 
job is to he pursued, and modern civilization has 
fortunately entangled her legs in skirts. 

When women scab on their sex by making the 
advances that are a man’s prerogative, they get all 
that is coming to them, and sometimes some more. 
But they should not flatter themselves that it is 
their personal attractiveness that does it. It is merely 
the fact that they happen to be females. That is 
why men are so fatally easy to women. 

And the deceived wife, after she has got over her 
pang of jealousy and accepted the pearl necklace from 
her repentant husband—some wives make quite a 
good thing out of furs or pearl necklaces—will sadly 
admit this fact to herself. She will plead with him; 


Woman: Her Life 


127 


she will jealously watch him; she will always insist 
on a new set of furs; but in her heart she will make 
the allowances which every woman makes for the 
frailty of man, and especially the fragility of hus¬ 
bands. 


mustn’t kiss him back 

But a husband possesses a much fiercer sense of 
jealousy than does his wife. He is even annoyed 
when another male brute kisses her, when every wife 
knows that to be kissed by a handsome stranger is 
merely a delicious adventure and quite harmless— 
provided she does not return that kiss. In fact, many 
wives find at least a temporary relief from the de¬ 
lights of being muchly married by being carelessly or 
carefully kissed by comparative strangers. 

Bor a woman has a strange lack of pride in her¬ 
self. She is not jealous of her good name—at least, 
not enough to worry her. 

But when she returns those extra-territorial kisses, 
she may feel some slight compunction. She may 
even draw the line, as a respectable wife, at kissing 
him back. She is there to be attractive, and being 
attractive she is there to be kissed. That is the 
mere logic of things. What is the use of being ador-^ 
able to men unless she is adored ? And how can she 
help other men kissing her when she knows how kiss- 
able she really is? Besides, even if she struggled, 


128 Guide Book to Women 


how could she prevent some deliciously rude man 
embracing her ? 

Of course, the world is full of nice or rude men 
who never get the chance to kiss her. And while 
we are on this serious subject it is as well to mention 
that to a wife in her second blooming or, indeed, to 
any girl, the only nice men are the men who are 
rude. As the Maori chief at Pipiriki remarked in 
his oration over the dead body of his slain foe, or, 
at least, over the thigh-bone of that foe which at 
the moment he was gnawing, no bridegroom will ever 
get much satisfaction out of his honeymoon unless 
he is quite rude to the bride. There is a time for 
all things, even politeness and altruism and the high 
and chilly altitudes of platonic affection; but that 
time is not the honeymoon. Nor would the bride 
herself be altogether happy unless her new husband 
was quite rude to her. (It must be understood that 
as the Maori chief spoke in his own language this 
translation of his remarks and this enunciation of 
his tribal philosophy is rather freely rendered into 
English. But, anyhow, that is what he meant. And 
as he had seven wives, he knew.) 

But to return a kiss is a thing that would possibly 
rather worry a faithful wife. It might even seem a 
sort of trivial treachery to her unsuspecting husband. 
It would imply that she liked those piratical kisses. 
It would be crossing the borderline between faithful- 


Woman: Her Life 


129 


ness and unfaithfulness. But it must be admitted that 
there are kisses that seem to begin and end nowhere; 
they are indeterminate, and it would he hard at the 
end of them for the woman to decide how much she 
had been kissed and how much she had contributed 
herself to the final result. Many a woman has worried 
herself frightfully over the analysis of such kisses. 
The only thing for her to do, if she is to preserve 
her sanity, is to work out the experiment again, 
either with the same man or with another. 

Now, it is a curious fact that a husband will be 
much more annoyed at these kisses than his wife. 
He regards his wife as his property, whereas she re¬ 
gards herself as her own property—at least to the 
extent of being casually kissed. 

The second blooming of wives may come about 
naturally, or may be brought into sudden fruition 
by a course of grass-widowing. A grass widow is 
a wife who has been allowed to go to grass. It hap¬ 
pens in all marriages that the husband has to go 
away. He always has his business as an excuse. He 
leaves her behind and makes her swear she will be 
true to him and treasure his memory in her heart 
till he returns. She usually does, but she does not 
object to some other male person temporarily treasur¬ 
ing her heart in his. 


130 Guide Book to Women 


don't leave a loving wife 

A loving wife left to herself is a frail thing. How¬ 
ever much she is in love with her husband she cannot 
kiss him except by absurd crosses in her letters. And 
those who have received those criss-cross kisses know 
how unsatisfactory they really are. 

It is infinitely safer to leave an indifferent wife 
than a loving wife behind. An indifferent wife, 
whose only kisses are breakfast kisses, has got out 
of the way of being embraced. So when she is left 
alone her only feeling is one of relief that for the 
next two months she won’t have to kiss him between 
the bacon and eggs and the coffee. She settles down 
to a long delicious laze from being icily embraced. 
She needn’t bother, for this long holiday, to he nice 
to her husband. She gladly lets herself flop. She 
doesn’t want any excitement; she has long ago got 
out of the way of feeling or wanting any. And the 
idea of poor old Charles being exciting is absurd. 
And the fact that her absent husband is probably 
having a good extra-marital time doesn’t bother her. 
At any rate, he is giving her a rest. 

But with an affectionate and loving wife the case 
is deplorably different. 

Her way is made infinitely more difficult by the 
fact that every male instinctively knows a grass 
widow at sight. There is something intangible and 


Woman: Her Life 131 

imperceptible, but certainly grassy, about a wife 
who has gone to grass. She looks so wistful; she 
looks so pathetically loving, that all the world loves 
a grass widow. 

Accustomed to an occasional caress, she feels the 
lack of even her husband’s caresses keenly. She 
writes him long, loving and lonely letters, and doesn’t 
sleep well. She loses weight and interest in her 
nighties. What is the good of pink ribbons if there 
is not even a husband to notice them ? And she 
yearns for her husband as she had never thought 
she would or could yearn for any man. She grows 
desperate, and envies every real widow she sees. They 
can dance on the departeds’ graves, but she is denied 
even a tombstone. 

Suddenly, when the strain on her love is at break¬ 
ing point, she wakes up to the fact that the male 
inhabitants of the world are many, and that they 
comprise other persons than her one husband. She 
notes that the men on the street look at her, and look 
after her, and look for her. And she looks back, 
and isn’t turned into a pillar of salt after all. That 
evening she looks into her mirror and discovers an¬ 
other woman looking back into her eyes. Quite a 
desirable woman, with alert eyes on the look-out 
for adventure. 

Men are supposed to be utterly loyal to each other 
about women. A man when he sees his friend dining 


132 Guide Book to Women 

in that rather naughty cafe with the wife of another 
of his friends, never gives the wife-snatcher away. 
It wouldn’t be fair to him. It isn’t fair to his other 
friend, either; but then that’s the husband’s look¬ 
out. 

But women, supposed to have a much looser sense 
of loyalty to each other, are really a masonic society 
when their special interests are affected. Ho matter 
how sincere a friend a girl may be of himself she 
will never let him know that his wife is tasting the 
gay life with another man. That is the sex’s privi¬ 
lege, to be sly, to deceive. The woman who sees an 
affair with the wife and the strange man, is instinct¬ 
ively on her guard to protect and shield the erring 
wife. The whole body of women is banded together 
in a conspiracy to deceive the male. That is their 
game, and that is the only time when their loyalty 
to each other can be depended upon. 

HOW TO KEEP A WIFE YOUNG 

The woman who looks for adventure will find it— 
and its consequences. Her loneliness and her love 
for her husband become unbearable. Somebody in 
trousers happens along, with money in the trousers 
pockets. Her husband’s love has created a demand 
in her; and if he is not there to supply it, somebody 
else can and does. 

So off she goes for her first little flutter—an after- 


Woman: Her Life 


133 


noon tea, a dinner, a supper, and at the end of each 
a kiss. Hitherto she has only experienced her hus¬ 
band’s kiss; she has forgotten what the kisses of her 
girlhood were like. And the strange man is different, 
even in his kisses. 

She is excited, thrilled. Her appetite is whetted. 
She meets the wrong man, of course; for the decent 
man usually knows her husband or is in love with 
his own wife. But there are always waifs and strays 
from married life roaming the world for the unat¬ 
tached or temporarily mislaid female. Of course, the 
new man doesn’t come up to her husband. He is 
merely a temporary substitute. She tells herself, 
when she happens to think of her husband, that she 
could never put this comparative stranger in his 
place. But mostly she forgets her husband: she is 
too busy. 

Then she meets another male matrimonial derelict. 
He is just as exciting in another way. By this time 
she has acquired the habit; and everybody tells her 
how youthful she is looking. That is Nature’s doing. 
For Nature is shockingly unmoral; and a woman 
with a succession of affairs remains astonishingly 
young. 

If a husband desires to keep his wife young all he 
has to do is to introduce her to a succession of male 
friends who will flirt with her. Or, rather, if his 
wife is in her second blooming, all he need do is to 


134 Guide Book to Women 

introduce her to a succession of men—she will do the 
rest. 

Yes, but mightn’t one of those affairs turn serious ? 
Mightn’t she fall desperately in love with the other 
man? Or mightn’t the other man want her al¬ 
together ? 

That is one of the drawbacks to this post-graduate 
course of love. If the wife falls in love with the 
other man she is bound to suffer. It is very rare 
to find another man who is sufficiently disentangled 
from matrimonial affairs of his own to elope with 
her. So she worries and turns with relief to the 
solid, satisfying, but hardly stimulating arms of her 
unsuspecting husband — lemonade after sparkling 
burgundy. And she determines that never again will 
she allow herself to become serious, even over her 
husband. 

The other case is easy. If the man becomes dan¬ 
gerously in love with her, it merely adds to the 
excitement. 

And if both fall flop into passion there is always 
the outlet of the Divorce Court. In a world so full 
of uncertainty, it is always comforting for a wife or 
a husband to fall back upon such a sustaining 
thought. 

The loving wife, who by her husband’s absence 
has been driven to accept a temporary substitute, 
has always the relief of remembering that once her 


Woman: Her Life 


135 


husband returns, she will relapse into the humdrum- 
ness of married life. But, after all, a husband is 
only a husband, and his mere presence hardly makes 
much difference to a wife who is in the first flush 
of her delirious second-blooming, and finding all the 
flowers in the garden lovely. She will often forget 
all about her husband. With such wonderful flowers 
to cull, why worry about the lawn-mower ? 

THE SECOND FADING 

There is often another solution to the second 
blossoming of wives. The husband may decide to 
do a little blossoming of his own; and each may 
explore a different garden, content to allow the other 
to wander away as long as the other is indifferent 
to his or her adventures. Then the marriage remains 
simply because of the children or the expense of a 
dissolution. So many a beautiful marriage runs out 
into the arid sands of mutual indifference. That is 
not a second blooming; it is a second fading, the 
saddest end to all romance. 

It must be admitted that this modern world is 
conducive to the divagations of life partners. For 
the jazz and the picture-show and the cocktail have 
come into woman’s life. She is tempted by discon¬ 
tent ; she is affected by the lure of change; she yearns 
to experiment. She is particularly susceptible to 
these temptations because of the inherent dullness of 


136 Guide Book to Women 

her married life. In the middle of her morning’s 
housework she can’t drop along to the nearest hotel 
and revive interest in herself by means of a Man¬ 
hattan. She cannot exchange views with her female 
friends at the bar or the club upon the new silhouette 
or the smartest depth of the low-water mark of even¬ 
ing dresses on her back. She cannot even take a 
half-hour stroll down the streets, for that would mean 
going to the trouble of taking off most of one dress 
and putting on another. Her day is a dull one; why 
shouldn’t she try a little excitement ? 

When a man comes home at night all he wants 
is to stay at home. He has had such a busy and 
varied day that he wants to get into his slippers 
and that easy chair and stay there. But woman 
is mostly at home—at home to dullness. She wants 
to spend her evening anywhere except in an easy 
chair before the fire. A home from home is all she 
requires, preferably a home from her husband Her 
ideal is a life of plain drinking and high jazzing. 

All the world awaits her—once she puts her hat 
on or undresses herself in the modern evening gown. 
She wants more excitement than is to be found in 
the average husband, unless he isn’t her own husband. 
The world of glitter and gaiety calls her, more and 
more insistently as the world goes round and round 
more giddily. Why shouldn’t she enjoy life while 
she is yet blooming? She suffers more and more 


Woman: Her Religion 137 

from unindustrial unrest. She is undeterred by the 
high cost of living. So she puts on her hat. . . . And 
hubby dozes in his easy chair. . . . 

But even a woman’s second blooming comes to 
its close. There is no third blooming for the poor 
dear. It is generally recognized that the second 
blooming of women definitely comes to its final win¬ 
ter when a woman reaches the age of eighty-three. 
Unless, of course, she is cut off by cruel death at a 
pitiably earlier age. 


CHAPTER VIII 


woman: her religion 

W OMEN may profess different faiths, but the 
whole mob of them possess the one religion. 
Woman’s temples of devout worship are the shops 
and stores; the altar at which she continually wor¬ 
ships is the shop-window; and the god of her faith 
is the personage who sets the fashions. Nobody really 
knows who this god is; which makes that god all the 
more easy to worship and obey; and there is no 
woman rebellious enough to think for one moment 
of flouting his commandments. 

To every woman shopping is a sacred ideal; the 
trying on of a new dress is a religious ceremony, the 
choosing of a new hat a solemn rite. 

A woman may be casual about her husband or 
other women’s husbands, but she has the instinct of 
reverence implanted too deeply in her soul for her to 
treat shopping lightly. 

WHEN A MAN GOES SHOPPING 

When a man goes shopping he goes to buy some¬ 
thing and gets it. If he wants a suit of pyjamas he 
goes to the haberdashery that dashes off pyjamas, 
138 


L Woman: Her Religion 139 

mentions his taste in stripes and his pecuniary re¬ 
sources, and buys the thing. His one idea is to get 
to a shop, get his sleeping suit, and get out. 

If he went shopping as a woman does he would 
first spend an afternoon looking into shop windows 
to discover the latest style in model pyjamas, com¬ 
paring prices, and noting the correct flair and the 
latest pyjama silhouette. He would scrupulously scan 
the fashion advertisements in the morning papers 
and tabulate the shops that were having sales. 

Then he would ring up a business friend, and in¬ 
form him that he had just discovered that he hadn’t 
a thing to wear and that he was seriously thinking of 
trying on one of those new pyjama shapes, with the 
flat back effect and the straight-fronted contour. 

“Lovely” his business friend would gurgle through 
the telephone. “I’ve been wondering whether they 
would suit me. I’m very busy to-day with my mail; 
but I can easily slip out for a couple of hours this 
morning and come along with you, dear.” 

And the man would sweetly respond: “That’s so 
sweet of you, darling. Do come. You know how 
I admire your taste, and when I’m trying on things 
I never can make up my mind whether they suit me 
or make me look a fright.” 

And they would meet in town, and, in order to 
get up strength for the ordeal, they would first have 
morning tea. Then they would go from one shop to 


140 Guide Book to Women 

another, and the man would try on innumerable 
pyjamas. This one was perfectly sweet, but too full 
in the chest; the next, with the turned-up trousers, 
was certainly fetching, but then, he was sure he 
had seen a model just like it at that other shop and 
ninepence-halfpenny cheaper; the next, he was sure, 
would make him look fat, even though is was marked 
“Paris”; and the next—well, he had seen Mr. Glum¬ 
ly, who as, they both knew, wasn’t at all a smart 
dresser, wearing the exact shape and stripe. 

Then they discover that the whole morning has 
gone, and they both go happily back to business, hav¬ 
ing picked up a remnant of lace insertion, absurdly 
cheap, my dear; and three-quarters of a yard of 
ribbon that they might find a use for some day— 
anyhow, the colour is perfectly sweet; and some 
trouser buttons, because they happened to be tempt¬ 
ingly displayed on the counter, and you never know 
about trouser buttons; and a free fashion book 
apiece, which, after all, might have something help¬ 
ful to say about pyjamas. 

For women actually enjoy shopping. They can 
stand about for hours,, perfectly happy, in shops. 
They will willingly journey all over the city just to 
match a ribbon, or to run to earth a bargain. Or 
they will excitedly wander forth for a whole delight¬ 
ful afternoon without any thought hut the deep de¬ 
light of gazing into shop-windows. 


Woman: Her Religion 141 

A girl will saunter from one shop window to am 
other, compare the prices of corsets, imagine how she 
would look in that seventy guinea model, and settle 
to her supreme satisfaction how she would look in 
that pink hat. Ten minutes in the shop will tire a 
healthy man more than a round of golf or holding 
the baby; but woman will linger in shops all day and 
come away rejuvenated by the things she has tried 
on or has imagined herself in. 

This deep devotion to dress sustains a woman as 
any other religion seldom does. It is a life-long 
religion, too. The female child of two is as happy 
in her party frock as the grandmother is in her new 
black hat. 

Never say that woman is not religious! 

Yet there must be mentioned a sharp division be¬ 
tween the way a man and a woman shops. When a 
man goes into a shop for a hat, he mentions its size— 
there are no sizes for women’s hats, though there is 
only one size for her shoes: every woman takes size 
two in shoes. Then he puts it on his head and 
wonders. 

“That suits you perfectly,” says the attendant. 
Everybody is wearing that shape now, sir.” 

The man doesn’t wonder any more. If every¬ 
body is wearing that hat that is the hat he wants. 

When a woman tries on her hat and wonders, the 
girl instantly remarks, “It suits you perfectly, 


142 Guide Book to Women 

madam. And I can assure you that you won’t find 
another hat like it in all the city.” 

The woman buys it, happily. The one thing she 
fears is that somebody else has got a hat like it. Her 
terrible fear is always that some day she may meet 
its twin brother worn by her best friend. 

Of course, if a man is married, he daren’t buy a 
hat to suit himself. He buys his hat to suit his wife. 


CHAPTER IX 


woman: her job 

W OMAN’S job, of course, is to grab a man and 
give him continual children. That is how 
Nature has fixed it! but then we needn’t worry too 
much over Nature. She doesn’t worry very much 
over us. 

But though woman’s job occupies much of her 
time, it is only piece-work. As soon as she is a woman 
she is ready to bear babies; but usually she has to 
wait for the man to come into her life. So there is 
a hiatus between the girl and the job Nature intends 
for her. The other hiatus, which occurs when the 
wife’s children have grown independent of her, may 
of course be filled by darning socks and patching 
Billy’s trousers, but most modern wives find a more 
exciting way, in diverse flirtations, to keep up an in¬ 
terest in life. 

It is of woman’s first, and not her second, bloom¬ 
ing that we have here to speak. The modern girl 
can quite easily fill up the first hiatus in her life by 
flirtations, which are merely an apprenticeship in 
the managing of a husband. She may get through 
the waiting period by making of it one long holiday 


M3 


144 Guide Book to Women 

of girlish gaieties; but if she is wise she will take a 
job. Many a girl who seems thoroughly happy in 
going to afternoon teas and dances and playing tennis 
and golf, and buying new dresses and new experi¬ 
ences with men, will confess that she is often “fed- 
up” with the whole empty show. 

That is why so many of them marry us. They 
find that they are “getting on”; and in a blind hurry 
they hook the first male fish that nibbles at their 
lines. Anything to get in out of the wet. Anything 
to get away from the paternal home. 

Well, we are duly thankful. 

GIRLS, GET WORK! 

But the wise virgin gets work. And work is wait¬ 
ing for her everywhere. The business girl has a 
life ten times as interesting as her society sister. The 
business girl meets men as they are, not as they pre¬ 
tend to be. The boss is a man who expects hard 
work from the business girl. She, though feminine, 
is merely his employee. She has to learn a thousand 
things foreign to her nature and her sex. She has to 
be punctual; she has to be tidy; she has to be efficient. 

She has to learn habits of discipline; she has to 
learn not to talk back and not to sulk, and, above 
all, not to attempt to use her sex to gain her ends. 
She has to recognize the hard fact that she is of less 


145 


Woman: Her Job 

value to her employer than a male clerk; she has 
to learn, at least in business-hours, to reach the 
status of a man. 

Ah, but you will say, what about the employer 
who falls in love with his pretty typist ? You have 
met her so often in the novels you read and in the 
picture theatres you frequent. And what about the 
girl whom the boss weds, and thereafter can drift 
casually into his office and display her hats and her 
gowns before her envious mates? 

Such things have happened, and doubtless will hap¬ 
pen again, in real life. But most bosses are married; 
and when you see his wife you do not wonder why 
he sticks so hard at his business. And when the 
married boss makes love to you—you know that scene 
off by heart—it is in every second cinematograph 
show—you are risking your job whether you respond 
or retreat. The boss is not going to keep hanging 
around a girl he can’t get; and if he gets you he soon 
tires. 


THE MAN AND THE GIRL 

The mistake a foolish girl is apt to make is to im¬ 
agine that because a man causes her to sin he is in love 
with her. To the average girl this act is merely the 
first act of a life drama. To the average man, it is 
usually the last act of an interlude. But the act 
seems to the infatuated girl the triumphant proof 


146 Guide Book to Women 

of his undying love. He has other fish to fry—and 
there are both other fish and other frying-pans in 
the world. The woman who after giving herself to 
a man thinks that he is in love with her makes as big 
a mistake as when she submitted. Men are not built 
that way. And, unfortunately for women, women 
are built another way. To the man it is the perfect 
end of a perfect day; but the woman wakes up to 
the horrible beginning of a perfectly beastly morning. 

A man ruins a woman for various reasons. Because 
he thinks she wouldn’t mind being ruined; because 
he wants her; because he can’t help it; because he is 
tired of his wife; because his wife is tired of him; 
because he wants some excitement; because he wants 
to give his wife an excuse to divorce him. . . . But 
seldom because he means to marry her and remain 
faithful to her all the days—and all the nights—of 
his life. Marriages are not made that way. 

Yet there is this comfort for the girl who has been 
taken advantage of: she can marry someone else. 
And usually she does. And her husband never sus¬ 
pects or knows, and forgives her, as she forgives his 
own past. The idea, so dearly loved by the moralist 
of the past generation, that once a girl makes a mis¬ 
take she is ruined, is not borne out by the facts. There 
is hope for her in this give-and-take and easy-going 
old world of ours. 


Woman: Her Job 


147 


MEETING THE REAL MAN 

In her business life a girl learns valuable lessons. 
She is treated as a human being, not as a member 
of a privileged sex. Her sex really doesn’t count, 
in office hours. She listens to men speaking their 
real thoughts, not paying her compliments. She hears 
men swear and lose their temper; she is hauled over 
the coals just as roughly as if her skin was not ten¬ 
derer than man’s. She has to listen without talk¬ 
ing back—the severest trial for any woman. She has 
to do as she is told, and sometimes curtly told. She 
has to pay for her mistakes. She is held responsible 
for her acts, as a human being, not as an irresponsible 
woman. 

And she is happy. She looks back to the unending 
and haphazard work of the home with a feeling of 
relief. She is out of all that; her woman’s work 
ends when the office or the factory closes for the day; 
she hasn’t to wash up after it. She has the priceless 
freedom of her off hours. 

All this is not the best training for the future 
wife; but though it is customary to groan over the 
ineptitude and lack of knowledge of housekeeping 
in the girl that marries from an office, she has learned 
habits of punctuality, neatness, honour, and regu¬ 
larity that will make her the better wife than the girl 


148 Guide Book to Women 

trained merely to tidy up, make scones and beds, and 
clean out the sink. She is better fitted to run a home 
than the girl who has never left a home until she 
married. She can learn more easily what she lacks, 
and she can usually keep accounts. 

But her chief asset is a knowledge of what men 
really are. She will see her husband as a fellow 
mortal, not as a member of a superior race. She 
will not be shocked at his manners or habits; she 
is initiated into the freemasonry of business life. 
She will make allowances; her mind, habituated to 
contact with mere men, will understand her hus¬ 
band’s. 

She will have lost the bloom of her cheecks, per¬ 
haps; but her corners have been rounded off. She 
will be much easier to get along with—and the bloom 
can easily be replaced by face-powder. 


CHAPTER X 


WOMAN: HERSELF 

S O there she waits—Woman, Herself. What is 
she ? Angel ? Animal ? Comrade ? Devil ? 
Hen? Sphinx? Fool? Friend? Vampire? Cat? 
Comforter? Lover? Wife? Mistress? Mother? 

Is she onr delight or our damnation—or both ? 
Is she lust or love ? Is she beauty or boredom ? 

Let us say, a little of each, cunningly mixed and 
spiced for the eager and diverse palate of malekind. 
After all, no woman yearns to be called an angel. 
And where is the woman who does not shudder with 
delight when she is told that she is a little devil? 

She is not perfect—else none of us would have 
ever dared to marry her—knowing too well our own 
imperfections. It is the fine flaws in her that endear 
her to us; it is her weakness that makes her to us 
indispensable. 

She is not above us nor below. She does not dwell 
on perilous heights of idealism. She wants not t6 
be worshipped by a poem: she needs strong arms 
about her. We need not go down on our knees to 
adore her—she prefers to sit on them. She is no 


< i49 


150 Guide Book to Women 

sphinx; she refuses to occupy a shrine. And she 
does not know herself, though we know her. 

She is really transparently simple. She remains 
the primitive female, while men through the long 
centuries grow more and more complex. She is 
infinitely more simple than man. She reacts to all 
stimuli instantly, automatically, expanding and con¬ 
tracting her soul as unknowingly as the pupil of the 
eye expands or contracts in darkness or in light. 
She does not argue about anything; she does it. She 
is the key in the gamut of life that when struck gives 
out, sonorously, the note of her sincerity and herself. 
Her actions are reflex actions. 

And out of that sane simplicity we men, with our 
muddled and complex minds, made a mighty mystery. 
She remains incomprehensible to us because we can¬ 
not comprehend simplicity. That, indeed, is the ex¬ 
planation of Woman, the inexplicable. She is merely 
herself, without complexities. 

There is no need to make excuses for her. She is 
indispensable to the world. Hot merely to carry on 
the race, but to give the race the desire to carry on. 
Supposing our chemists of the future discovered how 
to replenish the earth by synthetic processes that 
produced only male babies, would anybody think the 
process worth while? Even Jehovah discovered His 
initial mistake in Eden, and hastened to remedy it! 

Woman is Eve, the intruder in the garden of life, 


Woman: Herself 


151 

the troubler of the earth. She is here to delight us, 
to deceive us, to dally with us, to destroy us. She 
is the divine irresponsibility, the stimulus and the 
lure. 

Men can tell her, brutally, the whole truth about 
her, and forget the only thing that matters, herself. 
And she merely smiles, as Monna Yanna smiles 
through the centuries, a secret smile, a smile meant 
for every man, though each of us interprets it dif¬ 
ferently ; true, she cannot understand that smile 
herself, hut what does that matter as long as she 
keeps on smiling? 

Woman is a dangerous thing to let loose in the 
world; but then man was not to blame. We chain 
her up, in kitchens and in convents; we tie her to 
a cradle and confine her in a wedding-ring. But she 
breaks loose and smashes things. And we love her 
for it all. She mates with the tamed but growling 
tiger in our blood; and we rejoice. 

She is the spur, the insistent urge of life, the knout, 
the rack. She tortures us to new endeavour and 
tempts us from the dusty highway of life. She runs 
wild through our dull and ordered world, and her 
hair gets into our homely soup. But, as we have 
said before, it is a golden hair. She jabs a hat¬ 
pin into our soulless machinery of life; and some¬ 
thing happens. She is the Eternal Unexpected, the 
king in Bergson’s new universe. 


152 Guide Book to Women 

And so we are linked together throughout this 
toilsome life with a short-legged creature that cannot 
even keep step with our longer and more decisive 
stride; she tempts us from the straight road—and we 
find strange, wonderful blossoms in the desert; she 
initiates us into simplicity and joy, and we are grate¬ 
fully, eternally grateful. 

So, at the end of our analysis of this soft and 
complicated and yet simple being, we find that her 
soul and her meaning escapes us—as it escapes her¬ 
self ; and thankfully and reverently and passionately 
we write her little epitaph: 

“You little devili” 
















